I am a teacher and just received 16 individual student kits. I am wondering if there is a special way I should set each of these kits up so that students in my class can access them and I can monitor them all. Once I put the codes in, will students see all of them or can I individually name them so students know which one to access?
I saw when I went online that Arduino actually sells classroom sets that you can register as a classroom, just don't know if I can do the same thing with the individual student kits and I can't seem to find anything that tells me.
Not sure what you mean, since Arduinos don't have any actual individual identity. If you program an identity, by including it in a sketch, it will be wiped away as soon as a student loads their own sketch.
Also not sure what you mean by "access", do you mean the Arduino IDE running on classroom PCs? Managing this would be a question for your local IT team, as that is totally site and network dependent.
Thank you for responding. So, I am brand new to Arduino. I want to use them in my classroom. They have an education portal set up where I can set up students inside of my classroom so that I can assign lessons and monitor the work they are doing. I guess my big question is, I have 16 arduinos that are going to be shared among multiple students. Do I have to have them identified somehow so students know which one they are working on or does it not really matter which Arduino they use, they can use any one as long as it's connected to the Arduino IDE? If this is the case, does their work get saved inside of the Arduino IDE so that when they come back they can pick up where they left off? What happens if another class comes in to use the same Arduino, with the previous students' work getting deleted or overwritten when the next group begins their work? Again, I am new at this so I am not sure I fully understand the entire process of students accessing. Thank you!
Uploading a sketch to an Arduino, completely overwrites any sketch that was there before. So there is no need to assign a unit to each student - the work that they do is in the IDE and that is what needs to be managed, saved etc.
That can be a problem if there are no local student accounts. Windows doesn't make things easy in that regard, it assumes that the user owns the machine. Unless it's an enterprise version with remote user accounts and so forth. If there are no student accounts/logins, the students would have to share a sketch folder with every other student that uses the PC for that purpose.
I guess all students have their own log on to the PC on which the IDE is installed. That is that student A cannot interfere with the files belonging to student B.
A student receiving an Arduino used by a previous student simply loads his/her own program onto the Arduino and carries on.
The problems come when the student has not only used a plain Arduino but has done exercises also using a breadboard and components. These are time consuming to recreate if these parts are shared.
The other thing is monitoring the students progress. They will simply have to copy their current program from the IDE and send it (somewhere) for evaluation (maybe together with a schematic diagram - depending on the exercise)
Thank you so much. I have a much better understanding now. My students will be working in pairs and they will have their own login on the pc so I see how their info will get saved in the IDE. And...to your point they won't be working with just a plain Arduino all of the time so each pair will have their own to work with. I was also wondering if when I enter the authentication codes if they can all live inside of my classroom account and then the students will access them from there and I think I have discovered the answer myself and that I can. Thanks again!