Technological fluency through circuit bending

Abstract

The general education curriculum at the University of Utah requires that undergraduate students take courses in three of four “Intellectual Exploration” areas that are not in the student's major: Humanities, Fine Arts, Social & Behavioral Science, and Applied Science. Conspicuously missing from an engineering perspective are engineering and technology courses. In this paper I describe a new general education course specifically designed to introduce technology and engineering to undergraduates from a wide variety of backgrounds. I do this through a noise-making sound-art project-based curriculum based on hardware hacking and circuit bending.