A fun kind of education
For the Physical Computing brief, we were asked to design an interactive object that helps kids understand a building block of digital computing. We chose to go with the Transistor. The term “building block” seemed apt for a transistor and sparked off a processing revolution.
Alien Radio is our way of explaining, in the simplest terms, what a transistor does. It is an interactive book aimed at kids getting into the core concepts of electronics. We were inspired by the philosophy of the Lectron System by the Braun brothers. The fun part of electronics is building a circuit and we wanted to bring the same experience to kids. Under the hood, we used an Arduino Nano in conjunction with several speakers, and custom buttons to achieve the task.
The story was inspired by the humble beginnings of the transistor itself. Transistors were widely used to amplify signals in AM/FM radios. The circuit itself is simple to understand and is a great demonstration of the fundamental mechanism of a transistor.
We position the reader as an alien scientist who is out to understand the vague low radio signals that they are receiving from somewhere out there in space. The reader progresses through the story at the end of which is the task of building an amplifier circuit.