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.
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