After School club projects

I second coder27's concerns about a meaningful experience in 45 minutes.  So let me look back over 50 years to see what might be useful...

With electronics, probably the best example is a crystal radio.  Just five components: L, C, D, antenna, and earphone.  The lesson is tremendous: all the energy for driving that earphone comes from the radio waves, all you're doing is filtering out the noise.  Magic!

With computing, I remember my daughters getting a lot of pleasure out of playing with Logo and its screen turtle.  With a few SLOC you can draw amazingly pretty pictures, and then make little changes and make other pretty pictures.  If you have a physical turtle, you get to draw them which is even better and you have something to take home for Mom and/or Dad to put on the 'fridge.

I had a lot of fun in high school with relay kits.  You got to make fun logic circuits the Shannon way with lots of clacking noise and light bulbs switching on and off.  Start with something simple like AND and OR gates, and then expand to full adders and then tally circuits.  Clickity clickity clack clack.  You get to see and hear something really happening.

I bet I would have had a lot of fun with Lego Mindstorm back when I was 11.  Lego was pretty much for art back then -- if you wanted to engineer something, you used your Erector set (Meccano for mes amis across the Pond).  In the USA, there was a time when 99% of engineers had Erector sets when they were kids -- I'm from the last generation of those.

These are all examples of things that take the spark and let it grow.  Be careful of projects that smother the spark with arbitrary complexity.

coder27 wrote:

 

I suppose any exposure to electronics is a good thing, but it frightens me to see

such limited exposure hyped as a meaningful learning experience.

I think your statement is correct, but as with a lot of the educational forum nowdays, its about exposing them to new things, so they can go on to experience it.

Unless their teacher/older sibling/parent/mates introduce it, they might never know.

I get involved at our local school only because I see opportunities for these kids to experience something they otherwise wouldn't know about.

Most of the teachers have little or no experience of IT, and struggle to manage the basics, that most of these kids are familiar with.

For the Arduino intro course I did, it was interesting/pleasing that of the 8 in the first course 7 of them/parents spent $60 on their own kits.

I have also been involved with a funded project that introduced year7 (11/12yr olds) to making a Xmas Tree, which involved soldering LED's, resistors, etc (not the smd) and then programming them.

FutureInTech provided the tools and mentors to assist for the whole day,  and they got to take them home, and program them themselves.

For some pupils they had never touched a soldering iron, let alone program something.

We also found that making noise seem to be highest on the list of accomplishments (having 20 playing the same tune gets to be painful)

Like John, I wonder what we would be doing if we had the same 'toys' back in our youth.

More mechanical and less distractions, but it got the brain cells rattling around, and I think that helps to encourage creativity.

So my suggestion is make it simple, easy to change, has good documentation, and something affordable that they can purchase for home (along with the necessary information about how and where to get it).

Good luck.

mark

coder27 wrote:

 

I suppose any exposure to electronics is a good thing, but it frightens me to see

such limited exposure hyped as a meaningful learning experience.

I think your statement is correct, but as with a lot of the educational forum nowdays, its about exposing them to new things, so they can go on to experience it.

Unless their teacher/older sibling/parent/mates introduce it, they might never know.

I get involved at our local school only because I see opportunities for these kids to experience something they otherwise wouldn't know about.

Most of the teachers have little or no experience of IT, and struggle to manage the basics, that most of these kids are familiar with.

For the Arduino intro course I did, it was interesting/pleasing that of the 8 in the first course 7 of them/parents spent $60 on their own kits.

I have also been involved with a funded project that introduced year7 (11/12yr olds) to making a Xmas Tree, which involved soldering LED's, resistors, etc (not the smd) and then programming them.

FutureInTech provided the tools and mentors to assist for the whole day,  and they got to take them home, and program them themselves.

For some pupils they had never touched a soldering iron, let alone program something.

We also found that making noise seem to be highest on the list of accomplishments (having 20 playing the same tune gets to be painful)

Like John, I wonder what we would be doing if we had the same 'toys' back in our youth.

More mechanical and less distractions, but it got the brain cells rattling around, and I think that helps to encourage creativity.

So my suggestion is make it simple, easy to change, has good documentation, and something affordable that they can purchase for home (along with the necessary information about how and where to get it).

Good luck.

mark