Have each person take a piece of paper and brainstorm ideas for 3-5 minutes. Then, in small groups talk about the ideas you came up with and pick one that collectively, you like best and has the best chance at meeting the criteria. Offer constructive encouragements and criticisms.
Competition should have lightning presentations at end for each time. No prizes, but ask for each team to address some key components of invention design: ease of use, clean code, other params that you wrote down…
Throw in a quick section on Matlab?…Ben offered to help. Maybe just some example code for parsing accelerometer data w/ FFT or something. Argh…Processing is way better for visualizing
Use Wii Nunchuck for easy button and accelerometer input? Not easily bread-boardable, but board can be taken out. Also, a lot cheaper than SparkFun boards and encourages off-the-shelf stuff. Print a bunch of adapter boards using SparkFun layout and do bulk deal with China or Dorkbot?
Arduino overall intro. Firmata is a nice way to control/see Arduino from software on computer. Might be useful for Build 18…