Button-sized module from Intel will power development board for students

It’s announcing Arduino 101 at the Maker Faire in Rome on Friday, where Intel is a sponsor, and the board will be featured on an upcoming reality TV show, America’s Greatest Makers.

Intel wants to help fuel the next generation of makers with an affordable new development board aimed at fostering kids’ interest in technology through hands-on coding projects.

The Arduino/Genuino 101 will be available in the first quarter of 2016 for around $30 (27 euros).

In addition to being easy to use and well-suited for foundational learning exercises, Arduino 101 can be used to prototype technology-based products that connect and compute, thanks to the powerful features of the Intel Curie module. The company has other Arduino boards on the market featuring its larger Edison and Galileo modules. CTC is the world’s first formal physical computing course for elementary and secondary school classrooms and provides educators with the tools, support and confidence needed to introduce their students to the foundations of programming, electronics and mechanics.

The Genuino 101 is a true partnershp between the two companies, too, and not just a semi-compatible Arduino-alike.

Hopefully the combination of Arduindo’s reach into the community combined with the power of “Intel Inside” will make the Ardino 101 fulfill its potential for both established makers and the next generation.

Arduino 101 is physically smaller and less than half the price, and it runs a small real-time operating system that makes it more suitable for young students to work with, said Jay Melican, whose title at Intel is “maker czar”.

Built on the classic Arduino microcontroller layout, the Genuino 101 ditches the usual Atmel microcontroller unit for the Curie module.

The Arduino 101 board will be incorporated into the Creative Technologies in the Classroom (CTC) physical computing curriculum developed and tested by Arduino and now deployed in over 300 schools. “Young folks who are building things are used to interacting with robots and cars through their cell phone, and this lets them do that”.

Intel also plans to send Curie developer boards to its device manufacturing partners, but it’s not talking about those yet.

The Intel Curie meanwhile has four IQ Software Kits (Identity IQ, Time IQ, Body IQ and Social IQ) which combine algorithms, device software, application and cloud software to help customers incorporate different functionality into their wearable designs.