Last year I borrowed a SparkFun Inventor Kit from KSTF's Tech Lending Library. I was curious. I also was low on time, so a few days before I need to return it, I threw it at some students in my CS class. They dug in and LOVED it. They showed me what they were able to do in a few hours so I decided to learn more.
The PD
Learning more took me to SparkFun's HQ in Boulder, CO for a week long workshop in Microcontrollers for Educators. I would HIGHLY recommend this PD. It was one of the top 3 PDs I have ever attended as a teacher. There was so many great things that happened that it is impossible to summarize them all here, but the best thing they did was give us a chance to CREATE with the materials. In a lot of ways, the workshop was run much like you would run your class. We didn't just talk about projects, we DID the projects. We even did a hackathon, which, not to brag, our team won with our voting climate system. It was pretty awesome.
But, from this I saw first hand how "low floor, high ceiling" problems could be implementeed in a CS classroom. Thanks to our fearless leader, Brian Huang, I decided to have a "movable light sculpture" project for my CS students after the AP exam that would be a final project for a physical computing unit.
Materials
From there, I wrote a hefty materials proposal for a grant. It included a lot of things. The biggest chunk of money came from ordering the Sparkfun Inventor Kits. But along with that I ordered maker materials that I had seen used most frequently in the workshop. This included polyfill, tissue paper, cardstock, hot glue guns, rubber cement, tape, duck tape, fun duck tape, extra LEDs, extra M/F extender cables, more user-friendly motors, a lot of stuff. I also stock piled any box that came to our apartment so students could use them in their project later.
Introducing it to Students
I'll admit that the Inventor Kit can be a bit intimidating. There are wires, lot of tiny pieces that look the same, it is hard to know how much attention to detail you need when putting pieces on the board. Sure, some students feel really comfortable diving in, but even I was a bit intimidated when I first got the kit.
You know what's NOT intimidating? play dough.
I saw this done at the MN Coding in the Classroom Summit with Professor AnneMarie Thomas and then once again modeled at the Sparkfun Workshop, but essentially there are two different recipes for conductive and "insulative" (or lower conductivity) play dough. From there you can make circuits with battery packs and LEDs.
I loved how this was a hands-on, low risk way for students to play with circuitry. I turned my kitchen into a Play Dough factory and made massive amounts of play dough.
I wanted students to be able to make a basic circuit so they would get the general idea of how electricity needs to go in a loop and will find the path of least resistance and also see how LEDs work with their positive and negative ends. Realistically, I knew that the lesson would take 10 minutes tops, so I decided to add the idea of logic gates with circuits. Students had to create a total of 6 different circuits with the play dough and then sketch what it looked like next to the directions. They had to create an AND gate, OR gate, NOT gate and (as a challenge) an XOR gate. Here is the handout.
Interestingly enough, some of my physics high-flyers were too cool for play dough and just sketched out the diagrams on the sheet of paper. When I challenged them to actually make it with play dough, it took them a while to translate their diagram into the real world. Overall though, it was a hit.
Introducing The Arduino
Play dough day took about one hour class period, but I could have even introduced the Inventor Kit in class that same day. I start with giving each group or pair of students a kit and putting their name on the outside - from an organization standpoint, this was huge! I didn't do it the first time around and then all the kits were mixed up with people not really caring where they put pieces. I had students open up the kit and poke around to see what they find out. I gave them 3 minutes to take things out and explore before we shared out as a class as to what they found.
Then we made the most basic circuit which is a blinking light. We used codebender's EDU site on the chromebooks for the code which worked out pretty well. Keep in mind you need to install the chrome extension and the server was down for two days, but other than that it worked great. From there, I told students that we were going to take the next few days to explore the features of the tools... and of course, if you're going exploring, you cannot leave without your passport.
Enter the Arduino Passport.
Ahead of time I had identified key "labs" in the Sparkfun guide that I wanted students to experience. For better or worse, most of the labs come with all of the code they need, so students don't need to read the code at all. However, for the "kinetic light sculpture" project, students would need to wire and code their own inventions. I used the labs provided as a jumping off spot and had students modify the code or the circuit and then write about how they did this in their passports before I would stamp them for completion.
The first time I did this, I didn't have students jump off from the labs enough. So when it got to the final project, students were unproductively frustrated. The second time, I added more space for students to modify code or add components and the project went a lot better.
And then I introduced the project...
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