The 64K Computer Club is an existing initiative born in 2016 from the collaboration between Polifactory (DESIGN, www.polifactory.polimi.it), NESLab (DEIB, www.neslab.it), and POuL (Politecnico Open Unix Labs, poul.org) to build a new design point for the community of hackers, makers,and coders at Politecnico di Milano. The primary aim is to give students a foundation to foster their creativity at the intersection of diverse disciplines, from industrial design to electronics and computer engineering, working around real-world projects that originate from the students' intuition and ingenuity. In doing so, we flip the perspective of regular academic curricula. Project work in regular courses is usually limited to specific disciplines, say computer engineering, and is based on a project specification provided by the lecturer. With 64K we listen to the students' project ideas and are willing to support their concrete realization, up to real prototypes, across diverse disciplines, while pushing for peer-to-peer and experiential learning. 

When 64K started in 2016, the Passion in Action initiative did not exist. Polifactory, NESLab, and POul ran the initiative on a voluntary basis, eventually involving a group of 13 students across Integrated Product Design, Electronic Engineering, and Computer Engineering, who worked out of the regular curricula for almost two years on the realization of several innovative projects. One example is the design, realization, and demonstration of the 64Key device, a hardware/software platform that enables impromptu sensing, data sharing, collaborative working, and social networking among physically co-located users independently of the availability of Internet access. Under the supervision of the involved faculty, the students conceived the early idea, carried out the design and implementation by learning complementary knowledge from each other, and eventually acquired the skills to communicate the project features to a diverse audience. In 2018, a public event was held at Politecnico to chronicle the two years of 64K activities (www.polifactory.polimi.it/hands-on-64k/). The 64Key device was eventually recognized as Best Demo Runner Up at the flagship ACM International Conference in Networked Embedded Sensing (SENSYS - Shenzen, China), in 2018. More information is available about the previous 64K experiences and this project in particular at www.64kcomputer.club.

The activities on new projects will unfold in a peer-to-peer fashion at either Polifactory or NESLab depending on the need, and range from brainstorming and conceptual design to hands-on experiential learning and public demonstrations. Successful completion of the course will be determined based on the extent the project prototype fulfills the initial goals.

dal September 2021 a June 2022