Monday, September 21, 2015

STEM Design Day - Explorations

Our first Design Day has come and gone. The students went through rotations and tried all four STEM projects. They will then choose their top 2-3 and work on these in more depth. The students got to work on coding with codecombat.com, Aurduino's, Sphero's and LittleBits.

The Arduino group was the most technically challenging and was where I spent most of my time. I was able to teach the 45 min course to 3 different classes. We led the students through an Blinking LED example build. We used this video from MIT as the basic guide. We are using Sparkfun Redboards and Chromebooks, which required some modifications of the lesson.

The biggest breakthrough for pulling this lesson off was Codebender.cc. Chromebooks are becoming very popular with school districts, but they do have some downsides. One main drawback is that you cannot run additional software on them. Codebender saw the need and developed a Chrome App to get Arduino's running on Chromebooks. And, since it's a Chrome App, it technically works on any machine that runs Chrome. The setup process for Codebender is very easy and they streamlined the connection process into just 5 quick steps. We had an entire class of 6th graders running Arduino sketches on their Chromebooks in less that 5 minutes.

This is my sample build and the sketch we used is located here on Codebender.


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