 To keep things going we're gonna move forward with Mitch Altman, who is quite a known name By his title as CEO of Open Hardware Crater Please do come on stage Briefly introduce Mitch Mitch is from San Francisco and he's a San Francisco based hacker and inventor best known for creating the TV Be Gone as featured speaker at hacker conferences and international expert on the hacker space movement and also for teaching introductory electronic workshops So quite a good background He's also chief scientist and CEO of cornfield electronics So Mitch joins us today to talk on open-source hardware and on education There we go. So this is my contact info Please feel free to contact me anytime for any reason. I love helping people anyway that I can and I'm gonna go over. Oh wait, actually, okay, if I take a photo You'll be on the internet forever, you know so Great, I'm gonna go over just really briefly a little bit about my background because it's Relevant for what I'm gonna talk about and everything I do because I Think it's really important that we do things because it's meaningful to us And this is the background of why stuff is meaningful for me. I grew up Being totally bullied every day in school getting beaten up often while a gym teacher watched and you know life Sucked and it was total hell. I tried to escape into television television, of course that never works, so I just time went away I watched the screen and time went away and I got fat and didn't learn anything and that made me more of a Target only to want to escape into TV again when I got home and that's called addiction and It was a long road and partly because of teachers supporting me and I am talking about education as well as open hardware today Teachers are super super important And with the help of them and other aspects of life I ended up quitting TV and getting getting rid of it in my home And that was a first step in learning to live a life. I love which was a long road But basically that was the first half of my life. Okay, so by the year 2003 TVs were popping up everywhere in public places this force that I got rid of from my life was Invading me again everywhere. I went in public. Can you remember a time? Can any of you remember a time when TVs were not in public places? It used to be the case, but they were all over in public places. I couldn't do anything about it But I could invent a TV remote control that could turn them all off so I did and It was really fun going around turning TVs off and it turned out a lot of people really liked it and I saw an Opportunity so I made a bunch of them in 2004. It was the first day of sales and I sold so many that my website crashed and I was on national public radio in the US and New York Times and the front page of the Technology section I was invited to Fox Fucking Fox to turn off all of the TV monitors in their studio while a lot 14 million people watched Anyways, it was quite a beginning. It changed my life forever for the better and 15 years later I'm still making a living from this totally bizarre Project that I just did because I wanted one for me Thanks so I Got invited to a lot of really interesting events because of this including hacker conferences Which I never really thought of before but hacker conferences were totally amazing I mean here we're pretty much in one right now where there's lots and lots of people all sharing what they love Wanting to learn from each other and I gave a talk on TV be gone And this was my second hacker conference of the 23rd chaos communications Congress Which was in Berlin at the time and after the conference people were like Why does it say patent on that? Patent that gets in the way of innovation. Why are you doing that? And I'm like well, I'm an inventor my brother is a patent attorney Of course, that's what inventors do and I'm like, but but but but I don't know Maybe someone will take the idea and only sell it for money and anyways It didn't really make sense all the little things in my mind to justify it didn't make sense. And so afterwards I Made it open source that was in 2007 and Open source hardware really didn't exist at the time open source software of course did but taking those same contact Concepts and applying it to hardware made a lot of sense All these people all over the world started helping me and they were helping me already So it was essentially open source except for that patent thing in the way getting rid of that made even more people help And then all these people that made it I didn't make any money from that But all those people called everybody about how incredibly cool this thing is and that's PR that as a teeny little company I could not afford and Of course, why am I doing this? I'm doing this so that people will turn off TVs in public places and everywhere and have more time and live better lives And when it's open source more and more people are turning TVs off and making the world a better place for everybody So that worked really really well Also at hacker conferences. I got inspired to start One of the early hacker spaces in the United States along with a few other people We started some of the early hacker spaces in the United States We all helped each other and we helped a lot of others once they saw that we were successful this Start more and it started this whole hacker space movement and now there's thousands in the world And one of the things I did at noise bridge starting really small. It's teaching people to solder one of the things I love and that grew pretty big and I'll be teaching soldering here if anyone wants to join It's tons of fun and of course if I'm teaching soldering I want to have cool things for people to build so I created a lot of open source Kits for people to make first one being of course TV be gone kit which turns off TVs at 50 meters away and It's it's just tons of fun. All these things are for beginners, but cool enough for anyone to make I Made a comic book which of course is also Free and open source anyone can download it for free in the language of your choice This is what happens when you make things open source people make it cooler including other languages So hacker spaces are these amazing? environments their places with Doing anything not just tech but also lots of art and other things But the main thing is there's a community of people supporting each other Encouraging each other to explore and do things that are meaningful for each person And when people find Projects that are meaningful of course they want to put all their time and energy into it and they get excited about it And they're motivated to learn all these things that they don't know that are getting in the way of making their projects even better And so people learn more and more in order to make their project as awesome as possible And that is what project-based learning is all about And why more and more starting small, but if it's growing exponentially it's growing growing It's kind of flat, but it's gonna take off and it's starting. I think kind of right here now it's highly motivating for people to learn and You know one of the things I teach is soldering and electronics. It's it's really not a big deal. I mean but look They're happy You know, they're just making a blinky light there, but they're happy and you know Even if these people never saw her again like this guy who made one of my brain machines He may never make anything with electronics again or maybe he will maybe he's gonna go off and become an electronics person because of it Who knows but he's gonna have this sense of accomplishment and a sense of confidence that brings him to the rest of his life And who knows what he'll do with that So one of my latest kits is a music synthesizer kit. It's like 30 bucks I tried to make it as cheap as possible and this as an outgrowth of a project that I came across When I was in one lab in the University of Illinois where I went to University that didn't take military money The only lab in the entire huge University of 40,000 people that didn't take military money so we were doing cool things like music synthesizers and Electronic electric vehicles in fact the person who started Tesla motors was in this lab with me and from my friend Martin and No, it was not someone named Elon It was my friend Martin and Elon had the money and he stole it, but anyways, that's another story in this lab, but I had no idea that I could actually do things in In electronics in a lab at University that I actually loved so My advisor there said you should just do something you love and I found music synthesis and I made that into my master's thesis and I actually started Loving going to digital signal processing class, which I was loathing before because in digital signal processing I could learn what I needed to make my synthesizer awesome School can be like that it does not need to be like this This is test-taking this is not learning. This is the results of being trained to take a test. Is this education? Yes, but is it good education? Can we do better? Hell, yes, we can do way better than this We can be much more motivated than sitting around having to do this kind of stuff project-based learning is really really cool School can look like this and school is about education is about a lifetime of learning That's what school should be is preparing all of us to live a life of learning a live a life We find fulfilling a life that we find meaningful doing things. We love and I really love that this place is called Lifelong learning Institute and so STEM comes along and starts taking over but this is like huge corporations This is a term from the US military because DARPA which exists only for the Guaranteeing this US the superiority of US military technology is seeing that education isn't good enough for engineers to do that for them Yeah, this is what it's about and they have tons of money. They maximize their profits. They buy Politicians the US military is six times the rest of the world combined. Is this what we want for education? Are these the people we want to run our education? I don't think so So anyways people have added at least an a to it for art this adds at least joy and creativity so that it's meaningful and There are many many many many many many places around the world that are taking this into consideration This is just one place. I was recently out. It's been around for about a year and a half steam head It's a hacker space for training teachers how to teach with steam And people can do this kind of stuff, you know, they're all sorts of amazingly cool tools that are out there like Lego Mindstorm But you know, it's it's incredibly expensive So why isn't there an open-source version of that if I had more time? I'd be doing that and maybe I will they're also, you know, like this is just some kid Decided he would like to teach electronics and he created scrappy circuits and for less than a dollar a person you can learn electronics Totally open source, of course So the more we have of these open-source tools so that educators all over the world can make use of them and share them and make Them better and continue to share that around it will help make More opportunities for more people and that's really what we want and it's up to us to do that because if we don't do it Will so thank you great presentation rich. Thank you so much