I am trying to organize a summer course for high-school kids, as part of a local program funded by Mosaic. This is associated with our local county cultural center. Last year I taught a basic electronics course, and for the hands-on part, we built a crystal radio.
This year I want to be more ambitious -- an Arduino course. The total classroom time will be 12 hours, and I an just hoping to turn a few kids on to the fun of being an inventor. I want to use a small range of sensors with the Arduino, just to show kids how easy it is to create "cognizant" systems.
My biggest limitation is budget: I have to keep costs at about $15/kid. That should cover, say, a Nano, a small breadboard, some LED's, resistors, maybe a thermistor, photoresistor, and a handful of other sensors. To keep costs low, I'll necessarily have to buy cheap sensors. We probably will do an LED project for openers, and then maybe another 4 projects that can be fabricated and explained in one class each.
If anyone has any good ideas about projects that fit this description using sensors like this, I'd appreciate your thoughts.
People really seem to like the projects in which the Arduino makes noise and tones through a cheap speaker.
Might be an interesting project to give them a premade sound file or library or something and a simple trigger- just a button would be fine. You could have lots of talk about audio and coding. Maybe even how to make their own sound file or something. The project would essentially be to get the Arduino to play the sound file on trigger input. Might be doable in one class- dunno. Real world application is a Hallmark greeting card or a talking toy which could both be used as a classroom props.
Maybe two switches to detect reaction time (send results to PC serial monitor).
Also have 2 or 3 more advanced (completed) projects to wet their appetite and show them what can be done.
Show them the bread board: HERE
Maybe show them some completed projects shown on YouTube eg:
How about a thermometer.
Stage 1:
Have a row of LEDs 3 blue, 3 green and 3 red.
Determine which LED is lit by the temperature of the thermistor.
Stage 2:
Have a sound alarm go off if the temperature rises too far (1st red LED lit) and a different tone if the temperature falls too far (3rd blue LED lit)
Stage 3: Adjust the temperature of the middle green LED to 21oC and the adjacent LEDs in steps of 1oC.
They've now built a visual and audio alarm system for an elderly person (grandparent?) so that they don't overheat or suffer from hypothermia.
