Hi all -
We're the Craft Tech Lab at University of Colorado, Boulder (proud home to Leah Buechley's development of the LilyPad Arduino). Our latest project involves building tools to help people "debug" e-textiles projects. That is, we're trying to think of handheld tools we can build to help kids (and adults) find breaks in thread, faulty components, incorrect polarity, and so on, in an easy and non-overwhelming way.
Do you have a dream tool specific to e-textiles? If you come up with something we end up prototyping, we'll try to send you a mock-up to test. The tool can be specific to physical building - like a fingertip multimeter to help kids trace their circuits to test continuity - or be oriented toward mapping the code component to the pins of a LilyPad, etc.
This project is sponsored by a grant from the National Science Foundation: NSF Award Search: Award # 1742140 - Collaborative Research: Debugging by Design: Developing a Tool Set for Debugging with Electronic Textiles to Promote Computational and Engineering Thinking in High School
Thanks very much,
CU Boulder's "Debugging by Design" team.