Last summer my 5 year old grandson spent the week with me and I promised his mother it would be educational and him that it would be fun. Early in the week we wired up LEDs, beepers and switches, learned about polarity, etc. We played with a simple robot that could be programmed to run a route. I kept it to only a couple of hours a day and allotted time to do other stuff. The highlight was a project we did at the end of the week.
My objective with the project was to teach him a bit about the design process and drawing schematics since he is too young to solder. Those are dry topics so the key was to work on something that interested him. What interests him is games and there is a ice cream shop not too far from us that has a "Whack A Mole" game where a little rodent pops it's head up through holes and you try to whack it with a soft mallet and score points. Very cerebral I know, but fun for 5 year olds. After talking about it a while we decided to design and build something similar.
We looked at what I had on hand and then I talked him through the components. He drew the simplified diagram below after looking at the schematic of one of my projects and a discussion of how they are read.
He named it the "Light Press Game" and it consists of a battery powered microcontroller (uC on the diagram), four colored buttons (B), a WS2811 LED (LL, can't remember why he labeled it that), and an on/off switch. The WS2811 blinks red, green, blue, and white randomly while the player tries to push the corresponding button in the randomly allotted time. That night after he had gone to bed I soldered it up, programmed it, and mounted it on a small piece of plywood.
As can be seen, I tried to follow his layout but added separate red and green LEDs on the left that were not in the original design for a user interface - i.e. to keep score. The green LED blinks out the number of hits and the red LED blinks the number of misses.
Needless to say he was very pleased. When he started first grade they had a "show and tell" and this is the item he chose to take. It is fairly rugged and has stood the tests of time and a 5/6 year old so far. I visited last week and was told it was "not working" and brought it back with me - the battery was dead. Not too bad given that he has had it 5 months or so. It goes into sleep mode if he forgets to turn it off so it is fairly miserly with the power. Anyway, bringing it home gave me a chance to photograph and document it.
The game is surprisingly enjoyable. It could also be programmed to do a "Simon" like game. The best part of it was his sense of accomplishment and continued interest in STEM activities.
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