What motivates you to use an innovative platform like Arduino?

Hallo everyone,

Currently, a few students of our institute at RWTH Aachen University are conducting a research study in the field of empirical innovation research. They are searching for answers to the following question:

Which factors motivate people to use an innovative platform like Arduino?

We would like to share a link to a short online survey within the Arduino forum to answer those questions and are wondering if that is ok!?

What do you think?

Of course, we are happy to share our results with you!

Best regards,
Valerie

Thank you for your reply!

We are trying to find out why people are engaging in Arduino as a platform and its functionalities (project hub, being active in the forum, sharing information) in general.

So we do not only mean the Arduino microprocessor boards or software exclusively, but more the whole website and community - everything thats build around the microprocessor (sharing of information, helping each other).

But we already have a short online survey, which helps us findig out. We're just wondering if sharing this survey could be considered as spam or something...

Thank you very much for your replies. That's exactly the learning goal of our students - How to conduct empirical research.

We are going to share our questionaire in a few days. Furthermore, we are thinking about an appropiate incentive for our study participants. Do you guys have some ideas?

We already have different options, but are unsure what could have the biggest motivational effects within the Arduino community.

Thanks a lot,
Valerie

One of the things that motivated me to use arduino boards is that they are NOT very innovative boards. Just common Microcontrollers, with an obvious layout, and just enough additional parts to allow the to be programmed from nearly any variety of personal computer, using relatively standard tools...

westfw:
One of the things that motivated me to use arduino boards is that they are NOT very innovative boards. Just common Microcontrollers, with an obvious layout, and just enough additional parts to allow the to be programmed from nearly any variety of personal computer, using relatively standard tools...

+1

...R

westfw:
One of the things that motivated me to use arduino boards is that they are NOT very innovative boards. Just common Microcontrollers, with an obvious layout, and just enough additional parts to allow the to be programmed from nearly any variety of personal computer, using relatively standard tools...

Amen

It's all the community... you guys rock! thanks for sharing your knowledge and experience

Hallo everyone,

at RWTH Aachen University, we are currently conducting a research project. Our goal is to find out what motivates you to use the Arduino platform and share your knowledge.

Please feel free to share the link with other Arduino users. For each completed questionnaire, we will donate €2.50 to the charitable organization Engineers Without Borders.

Keep in mind with the term Arduino platform we mean the community you are a member in and participate in activities e.g. Arduino Project Hub, Arduino Playground, and the official Arduino Forum. We do not mean the microprocessor boards.

Click here to participate. It only takes about 15 - 20 minutes. There are no ads, but you need to disable your adblocker.

Thank you for your support!

The participation of experienced developers on the platform is more important to me than the participation of my peers.

But... I think I the "experienced developers" ARE "my peers." :slight_smile:

How long have you been a member of the Arduino platform?
How long have you been experimenting or working with Arduino technology?

  • Less than 1 month
  • 1-3 months
  • 4-6 months
  • 7 months - 1 year
  • over 1 year

How often do you visit the Arduino platform?
How often do you contribute to the Arduino platform (comments, ideas, projects, etc.)?

  • Once per day
  • Once per week
  • Once per month
  • Less than once per month

Um. The range of answers is not nearly wide enough, I seem to have averaged 3+ "contributions" every day for the last 10.5 years. (and... I've fallen off the first page of "top contributors", quite some time ago!)

Thank you for your support!

We are aware that for very experienced developers the given time ranges aren’t sufficient. Do you think that applies to the majority of Arduino users?

So far, we only have 14 completed questionnaires. To run a valid statistical analysis our goal is to reach approx. N = 100 participants. We have time until mid of December. We’ll see how that works.

Do you have any suggestions how we can attract more participants? I'm afraid we won’t get any results with less than 50 participants.

Thanks for your quick answer, Robin! Sharing the questionnaire through Moderators more widely on the Forum would be great and help a lot!

Regarding the valuable lesson for our students, I think we already learned a lot about how to plan and conduct surveys on platforms and how to share a questionnaire.

In my opinion, results will be quite interesting for you, since we are trying to identify factors that enhance knowledge sharing. Furthermore, you will get an overview what users of the Arduino platform do value a lot, what they value less and how that influences their intention to use Arduino in the future. We are looking at this from various perspectives.

Hey Robin,

I would like to add two things:

1.: Most of the scales of our questionnaire have been adapted from widely accepted, published scientific papers. Construction of a reliable, valid questionnaire does not always make it possible to choose those items, which are most intuitive to the participant. This might lead to the perception of shortcomings, but enhances the validity of the questionnaire.

2.: Your formulations are quite suggestive. I am not sure if the Moderators will form their own opinion. What do you think?

Thanks a lot, Robin, for your effort! That can help us so much!

Valerie_Research:
Do you have any suggestions how we can attract more participants?

What works best to attract attention on this forum is to answer questions. In your case that answer would also include an invitation to participate in the survey.

The next best option is to ask (technical) questions. A good technical question can attract an enormous amount of attention.

The third best option is to publish valuable (technical) information. Terry King's wiki is a great example. He generously provides detailed accurate information that has value to some / most / all forum members. While he does not do this, posting a teaser here when he publishes something new would undoubtedly draw eyeballs.

It has become painfully obvious that a minority of forum members read the stickies. Some subset of those members don't even notice the stickies. I suspect making the invitation sticky will have a marginal affect at best.

In other words, @Valerie_Research, you have a difficult audience. Most come here for a specific purpose (get an answer to a technical question) and little to nothing else.

The survey asks about the web part of the "arduino" project. They call it 'platform'. But that is not Arduino. I can't answer the questions on the first page. They are not for my point of view.

"I think a good number of people use the Arduino platform." I don't think about it
"I think the number of people using the Arduino platform is increasing." I don't think about it anything

"Many experienced Arduino developers use the Arduino platform." how should I know how uses Arduino and doesn't use the web part

"I anticipate a lot of experienced Arduino developers will use the Arduino platform in the future." dtto

"The participation of experienced developers on the platform is more important to me than the participation of my peers." I am an experienced developer

and then it gets super boring

Robin2:
I assumed it referred to all aspects of using Arduinos and not just the Arduino Create system. If you are correct then all my answers are rubbish :slight_smile:

...R

not only Create. the forum too. and Playground and co. I don't know if they know about GitHub repos, if they count other Arduino manufactures sites with tutorials and Wikis? And Arduino SE?

following questions are
"A wide range of participation possibilities is available on the Arduino platform (e.g. Projects, Panels, Blogs, Playground)."
"A wide range of supporting tools is available on the Arduino platform (e.g. Software Development Tools, Hardware Store, Code libraries)."
"A wide range of supporting knowledge is available on the Arduino platform (e.g. Tutorials, Starter Guide, Instructions for Projects)."
"A wide spectrum of feedback is available on the Arduino platform."

I don't know if it is "wide range/spectrum". I didn't do a tour

ballscrewbob:
I think it would need some of the remarks culled first before anything else is done with it.

IMHO if you want to bring it to the attention of others with one or more Posts in other sections all that is necessary is a simple message such as "You may wish to participate in the Questionnaire being conducted by the University of Aachen" with a link to Reply #20 of this Thread.

...R

One way to get more responses might be to post translated version of the survey request to the various non-english forum sections (and maybe translate the survey as well?) I've been surprised and impressed how much non-English activity happens.

(However, like most forums, the vast majority of "Arduino Ecosystem" users are "lurkers" - people who only read the forum...)

Thanks for your suggestions! But this wouldn't be considered as cross posting or something?

And do you guys know, why so many messages of Mods are deleted know?

And do you guys know, why so many messages of Mods are deleted know?

Yes. It's called censorship. One of the mods took it upon himself to delete what in his mind are unhelpful messages. This thread was 4 pages long, now it is 2.
Is he now going to censor every other thread that contains what he considers to be unhelpful messages?

Pete