More with Arduinos

TAPT,

We had a great meeting Saturday (actually Saturday before last), playing with Arduinos. Many thanks to Juan Cuarda and Chien-Wei Han for the time taken to instruct. I was asked for a more advanced workshop, so maybe that's a future topic. 

If you missed that workshop, or even if you didn't, you might be interested in the flyer attached, kindly forwarded by Bruce Bayly. According to the organizer, Eric Case, as written to Bruce:

We are trying to make the workshop accessible to everyone.  I’m hoping some people will bring their middle school or high school children.

Room 214, in McClelland Hall, has 29 computers and holds about 50 people, although I don’t expect we’ll have that many at any one time, but if you can send 50 over, we’ll take them.  The building should be unlocked from 7 AM to 5 PM on Saturday.

I hope you and your students can make it.
-Eric

Contact for Eric:

Eric Case, CISSP
Lecturer
Information Security Evangelist
Department of Management Information Systems
Eller College of Management, The University of Arizona
ecase (at) email (dot) arizona (dot) edu
http://www.linkedin.com/in/ericcase

[There is a flyer here.]

Our next TAPT meeting is December 10, at 8:30 am, at J.D. Garcia's house. [Use the contact form on this blog if you need the address]

We'll have our usual breakfast potluck, and it could be holiday-themed if you choose, no expectations though. We will be planning our next semester dates and activities, and socializing. We aim to end around 10:30.

Hope everyone's semester is ending well,

Karie

Meeting Tomorrow

Tucson Area Teachers,

Two Pima teachers will be leading an Arduino workshop just for us Saturday. I hope you can come, and if you are planning to come, please drop me a quick line. 

We will meet at 8:30 am in room F102 at Pima Community College West Campus. Park on the north side of Pima, past the solar panels. Walk up the main steps near the J building and the F building and F102 will be right in front of you.

We have our computers configured with Arduino software, but if you would like to download your own, you will be able to do it at the workshop. Or if you have already downloaded it from Arduino at https://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/Software, that works too. We will be using Arduino Unos, and if you have one of those, bring that too. 

There will be coffee and snacks, and also let me know if you would like a re-cert certificate. 

Some projects: the ubiquitous flashing light, timer, running a DC motor, ...

Chien Wei is making some handouts for us, and a rough head count would be helpful. If you decide to come at the last minute, that's fine, we just need an approximate number.

To get to Pima, 2202 W. Anklam Road: From Speedway, going west, go past the I10 freeway. There is a light at Greasewood, where you should turn left. Take the first left into Pima, and follow the drive all the way around, past the solar panels to the next parking lot. Look for my red car. There is a big set of steps, and our room, F102, will be near the top of the steps. 

Hope to see you there!

Any questions, please email me.

Karie

Meeting/Workshop this Saturday - Arduinos

Dear Physics Teachers,

We meet this week, November 19th, for a workshop on “Using Arduinos”. The workshop will be at Pima Community College in room F130 - I’ll send directions later in the week. Chien-Wei Han, Physics Instructor at Pima, will be leading the workshop. We have some Arduinos, or you can bring your own.They are widely available online or from computer stores around town. I ordered one from Amazon, and have seen them at Simutek on Ft. Lowell.

We’ll start at 8:30 and plan to end around 11:00 or so. I’ll bring coffee and cookies.

If you are using your own computer, you will be able to download the software needed at the workshop. Or you can use one of our computers. 

Here’s a little blurb about Arduino from (http://www.innovatemyschool.com/ideas/item/832-why-arduino-is-great-for-the-classroom.html):

The Arduino board is designed for artists and hobbyists – in other words people who are not necessarily roboticists or ‘geeky’ by nature, but are interested in making things that move, interactive models and projects that react to the environment and have some degree of sophistication and elegance.

If we think about young students, the majority of them will fall into that category. Most kids are usually interested in model making and it's okay to admit to liking it amongst their peers. Imagine making a board game with an electronic score keeper, or an interactive house model - gender and self-image safe projects that can be done with an arduino.

Because of this target audience, getting little models or prototypes working with arduino is really quick, easy and efficient – you plug the board into your usb port, write your code – which is simplified, yet has massive capabilities at the same time – hit download and, wahey, it works!

We all know how frustrating it is when, in any lesson involving technology, you can’t get past the first hurdle of getting something started up - arduino doesn’t have that issue.

Usually there’s no problem with the hardware (we have had the very occasional issue where it loses the usb port, but this is easy and quick to resolve) and no nasty bugs or strange error messages that stop it working for apparently no reason – if anyone has used the MPLAB IDE from yesteryear you’ll know what we’re talking about – there’s no need for an external debugger and all in all it is brilliant value for money.

It’s great for robotics because, essentially, a lot of hobbyist robotics projects are concerned with hardware control and reacting to sensors, which the arduino is designed to do and does well (yes you can use a raspberry pi to do this but, seriously, isn’t that a slight overkill?)

It's ease of set up and use, intuitive, simple software and low cost, makes it ideal for kids who want to start programming and a fantastic resource for classrooms.

It allows your students to focus on debugging their own hardware and code. They don’t have to worry about first learning how to use a complicated piece of software, or set up lots of hardware, just to write their first program - it's also one of the reasons that Lego Mindstorms is popular in classrooms.

The new computing curriculum states that students should be programming in at least two different languages. The arduino uses a simplified version of C, which is a hugely popular language, very different to Python - which is just as important to learn and the raspberry pi is good for this.

Recertification hours will be available. If you email me in advance, I will have a certificate ready.

Hope to see you there.

Karie Meyers, Ph.D.