[TriEmbed] Middle school presentation

Sat Jan 24 18:31:14 CST 2015

You imply a key point, Shane: it would be very frustrating for a whole 
class full of kids to share a single computer. My experience has been 
with settings where kids are going from place to place such that only a 
few are at any one thing at a time. I totally lost sight of that with my 
posting to the list. The other significant headache with the RPI 
approach is the pile of free little monitors out in the world do not 
support HDMI and the pile of free mice and keyboards are often PS2 vs 
the necessary USB type. Then there's power supplies, etc. To make even a 
small number of these systems would involve scrounging a lot of stuff.

I looked at the slides and poked around in the Eagle files for the 
project Shane pointed to and have a few comments.

I agree this project could provide an *incredible* experience for 6+ 
graders. But to emulate the format described in the slides would require 
some number of programmers (they used one per pair of students). Jon 
Wolfe of Anibit might make a deal on a batch of Adafruit USBtinyISP 
programmer kits but they're retail price is about $22.

But one additional pain might be that edge connector. I really expected 
to see a 2x3 or 2x5 _PIN_ header connector on this board. But it appears 
this board would require some kind of edge to pin header connector (that 
feels like it could cost a few bucks a throw) or else an adapter cable 
(guestimate a buck a piece). The Adafruit programmer comes with a 2x5 
connector/cable (in addition to 2x3). In my opinion step one for 
pursuing this would be to tweak the PCB design to use a standard 2x3 
male header to eliminate the need for some weird adapter lashup.

-Pete

PS I've come to terms with this Adafruit programmer and don't hate it 
any more. I discovered why it wouldn't work some times (and anybody 
considering buying one of these should ping me for the details to avoid 
some real heartburn). My remaining issues with it that aren't germane to 
a student project are that a) it's unbelievably slow compared to it's 
somewhat more expensive cousins and b) it applies over four volts to VCC 
no matter what the power jumper setting is. That's highly stressful to 
discover after the fact if your circuit board contains devices that 
forbid voltages this high.

On 01/24/2015 05:00 PM, Shane Trent wrote:
> Slightly different approach but I was impressed when I read about this 
> effort (Raleigh guy too, might be on the list) to show kids how to 
> blink an LED on a tiny cheap board. I suspect you could raise enough 
> donations to build enough for a classroom.
>
> https://learn.sparkfun.com/blog/1193
>
> Shane
>
> On Sat, Jan 24, 2015 at 4:49 PM, Pete Soper <pete at soper.us 
> <mailto:pete at soper.us>> wrote:
>
>     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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>>     TriEmbed web site:http://TriEmbed.org
>
>
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>
>
>
>
> -- 
> A blog about some of my projects. http://fettricks.blogspot.com/

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