‘Humans Vs. The Machines’ and the Rise of Maker Journalism
Here’s an awesome story by Susan Zake for Mediashift on the rise of maker skillsets in journalistic practices – both technically (such as, here’s the Arduino IDE, here’s how you use it) and also holistically (as in, here’s how you document your work and share it with others!).
Bob Britten, a teaching assistant professor in the Reed College of Media at West Virginia University, built and taught a new maker journalism course in spring 2016. His students created three projects they deployed around campus involving temperature sensors and Arduino micro controllers.
Britten worked to add emphases in HTML and data visualizations to his classes over the last couple of years. As he started paying more attention to data journalism, he “kept bumping up against sensor journalism, most notably in the Transit Tracker project that WNYC did,” which tracked transit outages around New York and New Jersey during storms and other emergencies.
Adafruit publishes a wide range of writing and video content, including interviews and reporting on the maker market and the wider technology world. Our standards page is intended as a guide to best practices that Adafruit uses, as well as an outline of the ethical standards Adafruit aspires to. While Adafruit is not an independent journalistic institution, Adafruit strives to be a fair, informative, and positive voice within the community – check it out here: adafruit.com/editorialstandards
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
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