On Tuesday I spent a day at the lovely Art and Design Academy building here in the centre of Liverpool giving a group of staff from Liverpool John Moores University a hands-on introduction to Arduino.

We started the day with a short presentation to run through some examples of cool and interesting projects that people round the world have been building on the Arduino platform, so that the attendees could get an idea of the possibilities. The slides are here, but two of the projects were shown with embedded videos which haven't survived the conversion to slideshare - so you can find out about Tinker London's Centograph project here, and see the Kazimier's Spinning Fortunagraph here.

After the presentation we got down to some serious tinkering.

Each of the attendees had one of the superb ARDX beginners kits from .:oomlout:. and for the rest of the morning we worked through the basic examples, getting LEDs flashing, servos moving and tunes played on piezo buzzers.

After a break for lunch everyone teamed up into groups of three or four and put their new-found abilities to work in a project of their own creation. By the end of the day we had a light-sensor controlled musical instrument; a tuneful twitter alert-bot; and a repurposed cup that could walk around on its own, leaving a trail of pen marks as it went. Quite a variety of projects and everyone managed to get something up and running to end the day on a high.