[TriEmbed] Middle school presentation

[Pete Soper]

I've done a few things in area elementary schools and school carnivals 
and a Durham library but mostly helping kids play with "Squishy Circuits 
<http://courseweb.stthomas.edu/apthomas/SquishyCircuits/>" (and "Banana 
Piano", but IMO that's not at all relevant to this topic).

But my cohorts showed the kids how to play with Scratch 
<http://scratch.mit.edu/> (which comes preinstalled as part of Raspbian 
Linux for RPI these days). If I were going to do something like you're 
talking about, and could put a little time into it I'd jumper a 
Raspberry Pi to a solderless breadboard with a few LEDs and piezo 
beeper, et al on it and use Scratch, show the kids how to use it, then 
stand back and watch. If you google "raspberry pi scratch gpio projects 
<https://www.google.com/search?q=raspberry+pi+scratch+gpio+projects&oq=raspberry+pi+scratch+gpio+projects&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i64.13625j0j7&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=93&ie=UTF-8#q=raspberry+pi+scratch+gpio+projects>" 
there's a lot of stuff available to help shorten the learning curve.

I'm semi-confident somebody on this list would be glad to loan you an 
RPI for a reasonably limited time to facilitate this. I've got extra 
breadboards, LEDs, beepers, and six other things that could be used for 
this that you're welcome to borrow. (My RPIs are either tied up or the 
old, 1/4gb RAM flavor)

-Pete

On 01/24/2015 03:19 PM, jonathan hunsberger wrote:
> Hi all,
> I'm pretty much an embedded n00b, lurking on the list to learn some 
> things (pretty successful in that so far!)  I work in IT, doing 
> systems engineering / infrastructure architecture, but when my 
> daughter's Computer Skills (mostly typing, plus a little bit of other 
> stuff, including "hour of code") teacher found out I was a "computer 
> person", she wanted me to come talk to the class about writing code.  
> I am not a software developer, but like most people I do write a lot 
> of scripts, etc. to make my job easier.  And at home my latest free 
> time sink has been playing with microcontrollers, etc. So.. I had two 
> ideas:
> 1. Talk about ways that some level of coding skills can be useful even 
> when you aren't a software developer for a living.
> 2. Talk about how you can use code to do things "in the real world" 
> with all of the easily-accessible microcontrollers that are on the 
> market these days.
>
> Kind of leaning toward the second one since it seems more like playing 
> than working.  For kids who have just come out of "hour of code" and 
> maybe a few hours of codecademy, I was thinking it might be cool just 
> to bring in an Arduino and some common peripherals (sensors, LEDs, 
> etc.) and show how easy it is to quickly get something working using 
> SparkFun/AdaFruit tutorials and running/modifying example sketches 
> that come with the Arduino IDE.  Generally show them how accessible it 
> can be and give them the basic info about getting started with it if 
> it is interesting to them.
>
> Have any of you done anything like that?  Does anyone have advice on 
> specific things to demonstrate, ways to organize the presentation, 
> etc.?  This would be for middle school students.  6th grade for sure, 
> not sure about 7th and 8th.
>
> Thanks!
>
>
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