Recent research on new media has focused on understanding how young people are adopting sophisticated tools and methods for responding to media through creative production, including youth’s playing and making of video games, creating videos and animations, and contributing to and participating in massive virtual communities. While these activities have received considerable attention, current research tends to overlook dimensions of digital media that impact youth’s activities beyond the screen: namely, those aspects of media construction and design that dovetail with hands-on crafts, physical construction and design, and material play.

This relatively new landscape in the physical world suggests a vast extension of the traditional notion of digital learning — an extension that can enrich youth's expressive and intellectual lives by combining the affordances of the virtual world with those of tangible media designs and creations. We argue that as today’s notions of "media texts" are expanding beyond print to encompass dress, speech, drawing, and dance, we need to consider how engagement with digital media can include tangible media texts.

Our research focuses on one particularly promising application of tangible media texts called computational crafts and electronic textiles (e-textiles). These include young people's design of programmable garments, accessories (such as jacket patches), and costumes. Such designs incorporate elements of embedded computing (for controlling the behavior of fabric artifacts), novel materials (e.g., conductive fibers or Velcro, etc.), sensors (e.g., light and sound), and actuators (e.g., LEDs and speakers), in addition to traditional aspects of fabric crafts.What follows is a series of 'worked examples' that have engaged the DIY, youth, and research communities alike. A simple sewn circuit project is presented first as an introduction to the materials, followed by a computationally enhanced wearable computer project that uses a small LED display to create a POV wristband, and lastly applications using wearable computers to teach young children about complex systems through game play is presented.

One of first large units designed in the Quest Atlantis project (see QuestAtlantis.org), Taiga was developed to better understand the power of videogame methodologies and technologies for learning water quality concepts.

One of first large units designed in the Quest Atlantis project (see QuestAtlantis.org), Taiga was developed to better understand the power of videogame methodologies and technologies for learning water quality concepts.

This is an overview about the what, the why, the when, and the how of a worked example. Please share your thoughts and help evolve the usefullness of this offering.

This unit was developed through support of the MacArthur Foundation and is a unit in the Quest Atlantis project (see QuestAtlantis.org). Modern Prometheus was based on Shelley's Frankenstein and was developed to better understand the power of videogame methodologies and technologies for learning persuasive writing and engaging in ethics.