Our Tribal Department of Education is looking for new ways to encourage our Native American (middle school, ages approx. 9 to 13 years old) kids to become interested in science and technology. We are having a Summer camp which I intend to teach basic electronics, but we need fun kits to provide the much needed hands-on experiences.
Just basic stuff - what is an electron, why do they flow, voltage, what is resistance, ohm's law, etc. Which kit in the Arduino lineup would anyone recommend? We will probably have several workstations for the kids depending on how many sign up.
Any suggestions/ideas would be greatly appreciated.
Hahou' (Thanks),
Mark
Cheyenne & Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma
All these bits & pieces need some programming behind them to make them do stuff after you get past the basic electronics if you're going to have Ardiuino do things. Is there a plan for that too?
Expect some 9-13 year olds to know more about this than the teacher and encourage that.
Maybe you could plan on building a very basic line-following robot and take them through the project during the Summer camp.
A somewhat more complex idea might be to make a robot arm (using servos for movement) which can be controlled by simple bluetooth messages from a smartphone.
How about a puppet with servos for joints. Maybe some cords attached to various places about the face that can be tensioned with motors. With some potentiometers and buttons, you could probably make it interesting.
A traffic light simulator is always a good one for kids. They've all seen traffic lights and they look simple until you actually try to program that logic into a circuit.
The hardware required is an Arduino and a small breadboard, with some LEDs and resistors. You get to explain how LEDs work and why they need resistors. This also has the advantage that the kids are breaking components worth a few cents rather than robot arms that cost dollars. (Robot arms are fun but fragile.)
The nice thing about traffic lights is that if you have a group that's tearing through the project you can challenge them to add pedestrians to the mix or left turn filters etc. etc.
You need projects that complete quickly so attention isn't lost, and something that the kids can relate to (gaming, communications, internet, etc.) with the possibility of some competition between the kids. The ESP8266 wifi chips have a lot of promise to make web controlled bots for little $$$ investment. The class could together make a simple servo based bot and then they develop different programming and GUIs for controlling the bot.