willing to exchange experiences of teaching Arduino

Hi there,

This year, I made a bet introducing 30 hours of Arduino teaching for the student web developers of the Cergy Pontoise university (in the professional "licence" training course). We got started this week, and everything went really smoothly. All were interested. The pleasure they took in turning LEDs on and off was amazing :slight_smile:
If other teachers are reading this, I am willing to exchange experiences.
I am also teaching in the "Pays de la Loire" (France) area (more precisely Vendée) since I live there.

Have a great evening

Emmanuelle

Hi,

I'd very much like to keep in touch about this....

I have some online Educational material here: http://yourduino.com

Please feel free to use any of that. It is not "Courseware".. I am teaching an Arduino class now, and it's based on that material, but I want to later really write courseware packages...

DISCLAIMER: I also sell some Arduno stuff; kind of the result of my scrounging for good prices in China..

I have some Starter Sets both for Arduino / Breadboard / Components and also for "Electronic Bricks" which I find a lot easier for classes where all the students start out doing the same things. See: http://arduino-direct.com/sunshop/index.php?l=product_list&c=6 I'd be interested in your opinion of the best things to start with...

I have some Educational pages specifically for the Electronic Brick approach (Much left to do!). Examples are:

http://arduino-info.wikispaces.com/ElectronicBricks-1
http://arduino-info.wikispaces.com/BrickStarterSet

And a page for "Getting the Arduino set up and software running: http://arduino-info.wikispaces.com/GettingStarted-Software

ANY comments or suggestions appreciated! terry@yourduino.com

Greetings to You and everybody.

Its very nice to hear about Your experiences regarding Arduino and how they enjoyed the projects.

Luckily microcontroller system is a part of our curriculum here in Norway (Europe).

At first we started out with LEGO MINDSTORM.A good one to start with, but with certain limits.

Previous year one of my pupils showed me a link to Arduino :slight_smile:

With open source, lots of free libraries and additional hardwares, were still on Arduino.

One of my experiences from 3 years of using Arduino is the more open a project can be, without loosing track of the curriculum goals, the more ownership they will get, beeing able to suggest their own topics and their motivation increases.

Pupils are approx 17 and 18 years old and at 2nd and 3rd year at high school in electronics.
(where microcontroller systems is a small part of curriculum).

The education has been such organised:

They work in groups of 2-3 pupils. They choose their groups without any guidelines from me. They mainly choose by their interessts and the roles they wish to "play" in the group.(hardware, programming, planning).

The time available for projects is from 44 hours (at 2.nd year) to 60 hours (3rd. year) (with some new pupils attending from other schools each year).

This year I will try to give some guidelines:

Group share 50% of available time for common tasks and other 50% individually.
They are allowed to handle the individual times as they see fit, but not the common time part.
By that their total projecttime awailable will icrease according to number of groupmembers.

1st. year I let the pupils start directly at practise, teaching C programming (well, just as much as they needed
regarding their spesific projects). They showed great interessts and motivation during the year.

The next year I split the way of working in two: Started up with clean C programming first and then practise.
I could notice a significant less interests of the microcontrolling system. :astonished:

Well, this year, pupils have followed lectures in C-programming, practices on several sensor types.
This to introduce them to projects after new year.

This is something they've suggested and choosen for this year:

  1. Octocopter, which they plan to remote control using x-bee communication and analog joystick (potmeter outputs).

  2. Intruder alarm system using passive infrared detector, magnetic switch and some kind of sound device.

  3. Stopwatch/clock, measuring tenths of a second. Time accuracy will depend of their choosement of clock-generator type.

  4. Robot arm, moveable by , either mouse or joystick

  5. Moving car with auto tilt safety warning and auto parking system.

The above arent at present time finished defined.

Some of them might sound a bit ambitious, but I told them its the experiences and learnings they meet underway thats most important. Should they not reach all up to the goals, they still get awarded.(but at highest rating, they need to success in their goals).

There might be a project this or next year,within weather baloon, measuring weather conditions but thats a bit in the blue yet. I would believe that could be executed next school year. (My research and planning are ready, but awaiting for a few colleagues to join).

Well, just finished ordering items for their projects before christmas.

Early next year we will define goals and looking closer to how their objects shall behave.

Im kind of exited how they will manage the timesharing available for their projects. I might get a surprise in both directions here :slight_smile:

Ive thought of beeing able to share experiences with a foreign school regarding microcontroller systems. It would be nice to detect how others use Arduino in teaching, perhaps letting pupils do much of the "speaking" .

Pardon the non fluent english.

Wish You a good day.

regards Jan

Hello Jan,

Thank you for taking the time to tell the details of what you have been doing.

I have been working with some Universities and schools in USA who are using Arduino in teaching. This is a new field and many new ideas are always being discussed. I will point them to your post.

Some day I want to finish writing a curriculum for learning electronics, microcomputers, sensors and actuators. So much detail!

I would be interested in the content of the "kit" of parts you use for students in different classes, if you have such a listing.

Very intersting topic! I teach electronics in Palermo, Italy, at Istituto Tecnico Industriale. My students are 16 to 18 years old. I'm an absolut beginner with Arduino, as a few days ago some students of mine asked to me to use it during a scientific show we'll participate to during next spring. I' m very very surprise about Arduino as it seems to me "too wonderful to be true". I hope I will be succesfull in use it for the curriculum of my pupils.
:slight_smile:

If they find pleasure in turning LEDs on and of (like me) they should have a look at my Blinkenlight Experiments http://www.blinkenlight.net. These Experiments are basically revolving around just 20 LEDs but go far beyond what most people would expect :wink: I think the contents are very suitable for the beginning of a high school course. If you have a look at it I would love to hear about your feedback.

I am just gearing up to teach a art and technology class to 16 and 17 year old and a group of 13 year olds. The first machine I was planning to build was a POV machine, so finding this forum and your bliken site was a good find. I'll keep you posted.

Great! If you use some of my material I am very pleased if you post this to my site.

I am just starting to learn Arduino, i have read 30 arduino projects for the evil genius by Simon Monk and i find it immensely useful for learning. Now i don't know what to do. Is there another book i can buy to learn more? or what would be your learning suggestions?

I wrote an arduino workshop for our hackerspace:
http://tkkrlab.nl/w/index.php/Workshop_Arduino

The original is in dutch but we did translate this to english.

I made the workshop for non technical people with no experience in electronics or programming at an art festival in our city.
The public where the visitors at the festival and the maximum time would be not more than 1 hour.

Hi,

Lots of How-To on the Arduino-Info wiki here: http://arduino-info.com

There's a list of electronics and Arduino books there too...