Deren Güler #ALD13 @findingada

Deren Güler shares an equal passion for engineering and teaching, and creates engaging interactive projects that directly impact the lives of the participants. With the FLOAT project, co-created with artist Xiaowei Wang, the Chinese national past-time of kite building/flying was extended by a simple DIY electronics kit she designed into hundreds of clandestine air quality weather stations all around Beijing assembled and flown by local citizens in a city that at the time permitted no official air quality reports. (For more details, check out their successfully funded crowdfunding project here.)

Invent-abling is her latest project, a kit to inspire children 5-15yo to experiment with smart materials and electronics, tuned to reach girls as well as boys. Read more about it below!

She has enjoying folding a bunch of Adafruit gear into her “tracelet” project: “a simple bracelet that ‘senses when you put something down’ and takes a photo, for helplessly forgetful people like myself to find things easily.” (Check out the video here.)

“Invent-abling” evolved from our realization that although there are great kits for creating electronic gadgets and wear-ables for young designers, they are gender coded “for boys.” We created a unisex kit which provides children ages 5-15 with interesting smart materials and electronics that can be embedded in a variety of dynamic projects.

The kit includes an illustrated guide explaining the properties of the contents, and instructions for several sample projects to get the young inventors started. The kit will provide materials such as color changing fabric, tilt sensors, solar panels, conductive ink and much much more. Invent-abling partnered with Assemble, a community space for arts and technology in the Penn Ave. Arts District of Pittsburgh, to hold a series of workshops to test the first version of this kit.

Deren Guler is the mind behind Invent-abling. She is a maker, tinkerer, designer, and physicist. She has a master of Tangible Interaction Design from Carnegie Mellon University and has worked on many education, community-based projects. She leads workshop at museums, universities and other venues around the world. She is interested in combining different materials, craft techniques, and computational methods to make accesible tools. She created Invent-abling in attempt to fill the gap of low-tech toolkits for children, especially for young girls.

Read more.

Deren Guler and Xiaowei Wang



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October 15th is Ada Lovelace Day! Today the world celebrates all of the accomplishments of women in science, art, design, technology, engineering, and math. Each year, Adafruit highlights a number of women who are pioneering their fields and inspiring women of all ages to make their voices heard. Today we will be sharing the stories of women that we think are modern day “Adas”. We will also be referencing women from history that have made impacts in science and math. Please promote and share #ALD13 with your friends and family so we can promote and share with all of the world wide web!

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