I spent the last 10 days traveling in Mexico. I went to Tijuana, Queretaro and Mexico DF. There is quite a lot of movement around Arduino in academia, the arts, and even pre-university education. This is just a summary of a very intense week.

In Tijuana I hosted a lecture at CECUT, the local Art Center dedicated to New Media (among others). They would convoke people coming from engineering schools, and art practitioners. The girls at Protolab invited me to run an intense workshop in low-level sound production. Their model for local education and economic sustainability is remarkable, they are partly funded by the local public university, the rest of their budget comes from selling education. Finally I was invited to speak for staff and students at the National Polytechnical Institute (IPN). They run an interesting MSc. and post-graduate studies in embedded systems.

(CC) 2009 Protolab’s team, by David Cuartielles

In Queretaro I was invited to visit the design department at Tecnologico de Monterrey. Their campus specializes in design, architecture, engineering, business and arts. This -private- university counts with 95.000 students all over the country and their Milemium program for families with low income will reach 100.000 more by 2015. Mexico is with no doubt a country with a big interest in alternative educational methods, since their public university system cannot absorb even 30% of the applicants.

(C) 2009 CECUT, by Eva Gomez

In Mexico DF I held a mini workshop at CENART (Centro Nacional de las Artes), the equivalent to Tijuana’s CECUT but in a much bigger scale. Also, the CCEMX (Spanish Culture Center) invited me through the mediation of IKUSNET to a round table about open source and its possibilities for developing businesses in the country. There were speakers from the UAM (Metropolitan Autonomous University), OpenOffice, AMESOL, FLISOL … IKUSNET is a cooperative working with Open Source software from Spain that is specializing in migration to open source.

Here I should thank CCEMX’ director (Jesus), and CCEMX’ program responsible (Eva) for putting this agenda together and supporting it economically.