This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.
Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.
If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Sorry, it's not a school program - I don't have the credentials or interest in dealing with the .edu sector in any more constant form - just a set of outreach programs I've helped with.
I've been doing about a lot of STEM outreach, typically one- or two-week programs focused for 'underprivileged' students, FIRST teams, and home school collectives. A good number of the students are just getting thrown into things as a glorified daycare, but you do get some that are interested despite themselves.
Topics cover a variety of materials in shallow entry-level, so we'll have a block for circuit design, a block for CAD (usually only at the TinkerCAD level), a block for programming, a block for hands-on fabrication, and a more general 'art'-ish one, centered around a main project. Done ESP32 wheeled robots, a line-follower robot, a sensor-driven infinity mirror, and a macropad.
Circuit design is just really a basics-of-electronics. We'll start with giving people a CR2022 and an LED, show how the LED works one way and not the other, and the move to a dual-AA and show what happens when too much current goes through electronics. Resistors to talk up how power can be limited and what the math behind that is, how multiple LEDs in parallel and series work, bring in quad-AA batteries to show what changing voltages do. Explain multimeters, and correct (and safe) use. Potentiometers as a way to control resistance directly, then capacitors as a well to store small amounts of power, then direct drive motors, then how and why BJT transistors were used to control motors through switches. Older students we'll try to get into more complicated circuits like a metastable circuits, inductors, or very basic op-amp usage, but it tends to be pretty hit or miss.
Programming, start with computers versus microprocessors, how to compile and deploy code in Arduino, what the chips we're using even are, start with the simple blinking onboard LED and how to change time and pattern, add three or four breadboard LEDs, talk variables and types, the difference between assignment and comparison, and the fundamentals of flow control through if statements and for/while loops. Review what the arduino setup and loop functions are, why they exist, and introduce the idea of custom functions, move code from previous lessons into discrete functions for reuse and simplification. Move from standalone LEDs to a neopixel strip, introduce libraries, explain that Arduino is a library, explain that libraries can hold functions, review for loops and while loops in a neopixel context. Younger students tend to cap out there. Older or more dedicated ones, we'll get into the introduction of recursion, modulo, break/continue/return, switch/case, and enums.
So far we've mostly used C++ because it's the only really financially practical way to get the students something they can take home. Python's available, and been for a while, and I've got a stack of MicroBit's from a dry run, but just absolutely can't get people to handle the whitespace once you get to flow control. Been trying to get a Java or ROS option together, but cost per board was impractical even back pre-COVID and it's only gotten worse since.
Art side's been one of the weaker bits. Had a couple times where we had to fall back on papercraft and stickers stuff, but usually try to get some interface with manufacturing or less-traditionally-available stuff: older students got to go through simple woodworking to plotting out CAM for a CNC run, younger ones got to do powdercoating and lasercut, and this summer's program we'll looking at some sublimation prints on metal plate and mousepads if I can get signoffs on a safe process for it.
I also do lessons for FIRST FRC and FTC teams, but that tends to be more variable, and it's just the standard Basics Of Java / C++ / Python / LabView (bleh) mess.
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