I teach physical computing at a visual arts university, and when the administration asked me if I could teach my course remotely in the Fall semester, I immediately said 'yes, no problem!". I have a series of video tutorials that the students watch before class that introduces a set of topics and in class they complete a series of exercises to get the hands-on experience. During class I'm moving from desk to desk, helping students to troubleshoot their circuits.
It's this "troubleshooting" aspect that has started to concern me. In Arduino, there's two different aspects of identifying problems. There's
software troubleshooting and then there's
hardware troubleshooting. If we move from face-to-face to remote teaching, the software troubleshooting can be done in a video conference with the student sharing their screen with me. This isn't a problem at all.
However, once I thought about it, I realized that troubleshooting hardware issues remotely will be much more difficult, if not impossible. I can stare at a breadboarded circuit for ten minutes and not see that a jumper is plugged into the wrong hole. If it's difficult in a F2F situation, how is it even possible to troubleshoot when looking at a student's photograph, or even a video?
I'm at the point now that I'm looking for Arduino simulators. I need a simulator that can run on OS X, that can be managed easily by a art or design student who does not have access to in-person hardware support.
I've looked at
Xevro's Arduino Simulator, but it adds a level of complication--you have to edit the software code to make it work--that quite frankly I don't need when trying to introduce programming and electronics to artists and designers.
Does anyone have any suggestions?