Here are a few of Computing Explorations’ independent projects. For work completed as a consultant for other companies, please see Daniel Ozick’s profile on LinkedIn.

Zoot™ (in development) is a low-cost, wireless, electronic wind instrument that allows anyone to play high-quality synthetic sounds, such as clarinet, saxophone, or trumpet, with full musical expression. Like a real wind instrument, Zoot responds to the subtleties of breath, while adding the option of motion gestures and other controls.

Teaching a Robot How to Dance is a course in computational thinking for high-school students, in which simple rolling robots serve as the exploratory medium for the constructive learning process. Each robot can sense the distance between itself and a nearby robot, as well as the nearby robot’s relative bearing. In the course’s final project, students “teach” their robots to improvise a lead-follow dance with an unknown robot partner in time to unknown music. You can play with a simple simulation that includes elements of the first part of the course here.

Beetlebots are small, primitive, autonomous robotic creatures that can be built by students as young as seven from a handful of simple components in an after-school workshop. Kids enjoy the construction process as well as the lively result.

Dancer Board is a low-cost, infrared-based, beacon-and-sensor system that allows a robot to sense the distance between itself and a nearby robot, as well as the nearby robot’s relative bearing. It is used in “Teaching a Robot How to Dance.”

ThreadKit (2011) is an open-source C++ library which provides simple, low-overhead, non-stack-based, cooperative multithreading for Arduino and similar microcontroller systems. An extension to this library provides a framework for behavior-based programming.

Oil Spill (2011) was a collaborative competition and robotics workshop organized by MIT’s Marine Robotics Team for Independent Activities Period (IAP). Computing Explorations provided classes on behavior-based programming, an electronics and software framework for the students to build on, and general mentoring.