Recently, I had an enormously satisfying personal experience exposing for the first time some Special Ed. middle and high school students to the PICAXE during summer school.
I had expected my ongoing and untested boasts about being able to teach anyone to write their first PICAXE program within 10 minutes to finally be challenged. Although we only covered in a cursory way the commands HIGH, LOW, PAUSE and GOTO, I was very surprised how quickly these kids picked up the concepts and we spent most of our time controlling LEDs.
Discussions with the principal about an on-going, after-school program have me thinking about changes to my equipment setup, which consisted of notebook computers and pre-wired breadboards. These kids won't be able to handle breadboarding, so we will be focusing on programming. BUT, they did demonstrate their abilities to remove components, bend pins, improperly re-insert components and cables . . . AND . . . even remove the paper backing from the bottom of the breadboard, exposing the sticky tape. CLEARLY, not having kids of my own has left my own education lacking!
What I would like to do is buy / design a Universal Experimenter Board that combines the best of the currently available boards into a single, somewhat "kid proof" board that can be configured by staff for the day's activities.
Since I haven't found such a commercial product (my search has been less than exhaustive), I was wondering what you guys might recommend? I think what I want to include is:
Handle 08M, 14M, 18X, 20M or 28X1 via socket matrix
Power via wall-wart or batteries
Datalogging such as AXE110 with RTC and extra FRAM memory
LED / Switch Input such as AXE092
Motor Driver such as CHI035
Plenty of I/O off-board to allow connecting peripherals, such as Serial LCD (AXE033)
Thoughts, ideas, examples welcome!
Richard
I had expected my ongoing and untested boasts about being able to teach anyone to write their first PICAXE program within 10 minutes to finally be challenged. Although we only covered in a cursory way the commands HIGH, LOW, PAUSE and GOTO, I was very surprised how quickly these kids picked up the concepts and we spent most of our time controlling LEDs.
Discussions with the principal about an on-going, after-school program have me thinking about changes to my equipment setup, which consisted of notebook computers and pre-wired breadboards. These kids won't be able to handle breadboarding, so we will be focusing on programming. BUT, they did demonstrate their abilities to remove components, bend pins, improperly re-insert components and cables . . . AND . . . even remove the paper backing from the bottom of the breadboard, exposing the sticky tape. CLEARLY, not having kids of my own has left my own education lacking!
What I would like to do is buy / design a Universal Experimenter Board that combines the best of the currently available boards into a single, somewhat "kid proof" board that can be configured by staff for the day's activities.
Since I haven't found such a commercial product (my search has been less than exhaustive), I was wondering what you guys might recommend? I think what I want to include is:
Handle 08M, 14M, 18X, 20M or 28X1 via socket matrix
Power via wall-wart or batteries
Datalogging such as AXE110 with RTC and extra FRAM memory
LED / Switch Input such as AXE092
Motor Driver such as CHI035
Plenty of I/O off-board to allow connecting peripherals, such as Serial LCD (AXE033)
Thoughts, ideas, examples welcome!
Richard