Gilda Negrini and Riccardo Vendramin, two young product designers from Italy, wrote us to share their last work, designed during a course called Autoproduzioni at Politecnico of  Milano. It’s called MusicInk, it runs on an Arduino Duemilanove board, and  gives an alternative method to teach music to children. That’s how they describe it:

MusicInk makes drawings turning into real music, this magical process is due to a mashup of various eterogenous technologies: Conductive Ink  by Bare Conductive, MPR121 controller, Arduino (Duemilanove board), LiPo shield (removed on a second time), Bluetooth shield by Seedstudio, Android platform, Pure Data for Android (libido), Pure Data patch.
Our project was developed with the help of our friend Manh Luong Bui and has been a very hard work.
We started our project studying the possibilities to create new and cheap musical instruments, then we discovered studies about conductive ink and we decided to create something different with these two technologies.

Here you can see their experience in testing MusicInk in a kindergarten in Milano with children between 4 and 5 years old: