Jessica and Tracy talk about the process they used in an arduino workshop with young girls 8 - 11 earlier this year.

Arduino has its own development environment (based on Processing) - so effectively you code it in 'arduino'.  You can also talk to arduino indirectly via other programming languages such as processing, maxmsp, flash.

There  is a growing Arduino movement in the UK and workshops are growing out of the work done by the people at Tinker.it (which we will showcase in another video) and the University of East London as well as Toy Hacking workshops in London at places like Music Hackday.

A lot of this work is basd on the Lillypad Arduino kit  invented by Leah Buechley from the Hi-Low tech group at MIT a growing e-textiles movement.

(Video follows...)

Allied resources and Books:

• http://tinker.it/ - Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino
• Arduino website tutorials
• Lillypad Arduino kit 
• Ladyyada Arduino Tutorials
• Rainycat's Blog entry on using Arduiono and textiles and Twitter
• Tom Igoe's web pages on Physical Computing
• The Future of Making
• Magicbox free workshops - Introduction to Electronics for Arduino
• Newcastle Maker's Fayre 2009 YouTubeFilm

Books

• Just out and free and ongoing! - The Complete Beginners Guide to Arduino
• Making Things Talk: Practical Methods for Connecting Physical Objects (Paperback) by Tom Igoe (Author)
• Open Source Hardware Vol 1
• http://arduino.cc/en/Reference/LiquidCrystal?from=Tutorial.LCDLibrary