What´s necessary to be an "Arduino Teacher" in different countries?

After seeing some topics created by lost students who report their teachers know nothing about eletronics and programming while asking them to accomplish projects, I keeping asking myself this question:

What´s the necessary background to teach something like "Developing projects with an Arduino" in your country?

The trouble is that you need teaching skills, good programming (and debugging) abilities plus knowledge of electrics and electronics.

In addition, this unusual person should like to do this for a far lower salary than they would command in a commercial job.

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I don't see how the country matters as long as you speak the language.

But I'm sure they have a degree in education and a teaching credential (or whatever is required in the particular country). :stuck_out_tongue:

As long a the teacher can find an appropriate course (or book) and the teacher has interest and hopefully some science background, the teacher should be able to work-through the course first, and then they should be able to teach it. And it would be very helpful if the teacher has SOME programming and electronics knowledge/experience.

They need to find the right course, book, or project kit, etc. (I don't know about those things because I already had a strong electronics and programming background.)

It might be common for the Arduino to be part of a robotics course, but I don't know...

...At a university level you wouldn't study microcontrollers until the 3rd or 4th year so all of the students and (the professor/instructor) would have a strong foundation in electronics and programming.

But a lot of kids & hobbyists "jump-in" and start doing Arduino projects and teaching themselves. If the "kids" can do it, a teacher should be able to do it.

The main thing for the teacher and students is interest and the "right personality" for programming (which is "hard" and "different" than any other field) and electronics (which is "abstract" because you can't see electricity).

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I understand your concern for students learning, and concern for their (assumed) lack of knowledge, but are you aware "some" students do not pay proper attention in school, and never will a school hire a teacher who does not know their subject, and further, teachers are constantly required to continue to refresh or advance their subject knowledge throughout their career.

I hope you teach this subject to children because you like the subject and want to share the subject value, not because children who tend blame anything but their lack of attention for their own failure.

Truly, I wish you success.

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In the U.S. it depends on whether it's an accredited degree, a certificate, or just generic training/knowledge. In terms of schooling when it's not an accredited degree there's very little. Usually the school board votes on various subjects to cover but it doesn't mean it will teach them well. Each state in the US varies in its requirements as well so it's largely a crap shoot.

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Oh, yes, I am. I had some of these when I was teaching at an university (basic maths, not Arduino related things). But every time I started a new semester in calculus and noted that some people forgot how to add fractions, I use to spend 2 or 3 days reminding them how to do the basics before spitting derivatives on the blackboard.

I ended up in another career and although I really like teaching, it´s not my intention to teach Arduino projects. I´m happy to be here giving my 5 cents occasionally.

I was just concerned about kids trying to build things apparently without having being told where to start.

You have seen children perfectly navigate AR/VR games and anything online. I watched a two/three year old pick up a VHS and perfectly slide it into the player and press play. Tech (in the right form) is right for their aptitude of copying rather than reading. The line-by-line might not appeal, whereas cobbling "chunks" is more understandable. Really, why is code so un-structured that a list of hardware is perfectly connected, coded and running? That could be addressed and answered by your students. What's the worst that can happen? The ejection seat activates inside the hangar? : /

That may be what the "kids" say, but do you believe them?

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Based on the level of the questions, most of the times I do.

I'll simply state the following as my answer.

I have a friend who used to teach Beginning AutoCAD at a community college. He had never used AutoCAD before, so he just made sure to learn enough one week ahead of the syllabus and no one was ever the wiser.

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A professor friend advises to stay one textbook chapter ahead of the students at all times.

That is probably not difficult, judging from the class assignment questions on this forum, which usually seem to be posted just few days before the due date.

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Good advice in many subjects I'm sure. Helping a student debug their Arduino project needs rather more than that I suspect - it's so easy for the code and/or electronics to be broken in ways that need quite a depth of knowledge to fix.

Add in twenty other students who have (possibly different) projects that have "interesting" defects to track down and the teacher would need to be a superhero to be able to provide debugging assistance to each in an hour of classroom time.

And again, if they are that good, what are they doing teaching school children?

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Hi,
This might help, here in Australia you can study to be a STEM (Science, technology, engineering and mathematics) educator, which Arduino in the schools would come under.

https://www.westernsydney.edu.au/future/study/courses/postgraduate/graduate-certificate-in-primary-stem-education#:~:text=The%20Graduate%20Certificate%20in%20Primary,ability%20to%20inspire%20your%20classroom.

Also this from the Arduino site.
https://www.arduino.cc/education/the-stem-superheroes-the-educators-championing-stem-learning-in-australia

Tom... :grinning: :+1: :coffee: :australia:

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Being heroes! (What are we all doing here in the Arduino forums, answering questions and doing students' homework for them?)

Teaching is complicated. I've had very knowledgeable teachers who were horrible teachers (IMO), and I have fond memories of my first computer class when my teacher told me essentially "I don't know anything about what you're trying to do. Don't let that stop you from figuring it out. Here are some resources." (which is GREAT teaching, IMO.)

I suspect that many of the Arduino ""class" failures are due to having someone qualified to teach, say, "AP Computer Science with Java", or "computer literacy" to the technically inclined suddenly being asked to teach "Arduino for Artists." ("Arduino is easy to use by non technical people - it should be easy to teach, too!)

How do you teach electronics and programming for a platform whose claim to fame (or one of them) is that you can do neat stuff "without having to learn (much) electronics or programming"? "web search skills"? "How to use the Arduino Forum"? It's a difficult problem, teaching core "basics" of both electronics and programming, while still enabling "immediately useful" results. People graduate from 4y university CS programs in a state that is "barely useful" in most industry settings. ("First you need to learn our VCS, and it's really great that you had that Android programming class, because the first thing we want you to do is port this iPhone app to Android! Were you ever exposed to Swift?")

Most requests I've seen have been of the form "we have this assignment and we haven't been taught how to do it." That's a problem; I've taken online classes from respected (?) university professors where the assignments were entirely out-of-line compared to the material taught in classes ("Here's some C++. You can use that to implement graph algorithms. Do that and use it to write a Go-playing game.") OTOH, it's hard to tell whether that's what happened, or whether the student didn't attend classes or didn't pay attention.

Cases where a teacher has taught something that is just fundamentally wrong are much less common. "subtly wrong" ("Arduino microcontrollers execute instructions in a single clock cycle") isn't really a big problem. "Arguably subtly wrong" ("The AVR microcontroller can only do one thing at a time") isn't a problem at all (these are beginner classes we're talking about, right?)

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