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What To Cover In a Short "DIY Tech" Course?
edumacator writes "Our school is working hard to provide our students with relevant opportunities of study. We have a short 'seminar' period that meets three days a week for thirty minutes. I've chosen to teach a seminar on 'Home Grown Technology' even though I'm an English teacher and only an amateur techie. If you had thirty minutes, three days a week, for nine weeks, what would you teach a group of high school students? I'm considering the Wii-mote smartboard and multitouch displays, but I'm afraid I'm overreaching."
i would spend at least a couple of weeks having them build and program some microcontroller projects.
here's a place to start: http://hacknmod.com/hack/top-40-arduino-projects-of-the-web/
Arduino is a physical computing platform based on a simple open hardware design for a single-board microcontroller, with embedded I/O support and a standard programming language. The Arduino programming language is based on Wiring and is essentially C/C++ (several simple transformations are performed before passing to avr-gcc). The goal of the Arduino project is to make tools available that are accessible, low-cost, low capital investment, flexible and easy-to-use for artists and hobbyists. Particularly those who might not otherwise have access to more sophisticated controllers that require more complicated tools.
Right have a bunch of common people play with CRTs... Thats always a good way to start (a lawsuit). How about not letting them play with things that can easily kill them to start with. And it is not just the high voltage side that can reach out and grab out, the low voltage side of CRTs can potentially do more damage than the high side.
Bad Panda! No Bamboo for you! In matters of importance ACs will not be responded to. Want to say something critical,OK
You got 27 half-hour sessions. At least three of these should be spent on basics if the students haven't already had them, such as soldering & desoldering, basic principles of electrical/electronics (including reading diagrams) and using a multimeter... one that measures capacitance, frequency and temperature if you can afford it.
And basic safety, of course.
From there it's really a matter of what, exactly, you want your students to take away from your class.
The multitouch display is neat but the bulk of it is programming; do your students have any programming experience? Do you have time to teach them?
Homebrew robotics can be pretty straightforward and inexpensive. A few stepper motor drivers (Allegro used to give free samples of their 5804 controller...), some stepper motors of course (Easily salvaged from dead scanners/printers), a spare PC power supply, an old PC with a parallel port and adequate amounts of wire can make a pretty versatile robot platform.
If you want something more digital, microcontroller projects might be a bit of an initial investment but are also pretty cheap in the long run. Build robotic platforms, embedded data loggers, "smart" appliances, etc.
$20 worth of properly rated relays and isolation components will turn a PC into a crude home automation system. Add in photo sensors, temperature sensors (thermistor + ADC chip), motion sensors, etc for a more complete system.
Keep is simple, keep it cheap, keep it interesting.
=Smidge=
How about starting off with the proper use of a multimeter? Just being able to find out the current/voltage/resistance conditions on various rigs have served me well in the past.
Stay sentient. Don't drink bad milk.
How about building a reprap? Constructing a machine that can build most of its own parts is a rather useful task. Doing so will cover electronics, mechanics and material science all in one go.
Only on lawnmowers made in Japan.
You can get some pretty cool projects going quickly and easily with an Arduino. Combine that with Processing and you can do almost anything...
Unexpect the expected!
Because nothing says a good time like Electrostatic Discharge.
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How to use a multimeter, how to solder, what electronics bits do and how they all fit together. Start with the basics.
Feel the fear and do it anyway.
"DIY" and software do not appear together often enough.
I would teach them how to create their own personal "apps" using Squeak. Use Nebraska to collaborate and share in class. Look for a few techies to help.
To get stared, try Sugar on a Stick and look at Etoys, a specialized subset of Squeak. (You use Squeak to create Etoys.)
http://www.squeak.org/
http://squeakland.org/
http://www.sugarlabs.org/
Nebraska: http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/1356
Wider range of info: http://squeak.zwiki.org/SqueakNotes
A recent class at University of Illinois: https://agora.cs.illinois.edu/display/cs598rej/Spring+2009;jsessionid=3BA508D972A809064DC117DBDF7C36C8
Gary Dunn
Open Slate Project
Some of that will be difficult to teach in just 30 minute sessions. Stick to the basics.
That should give you a good amount of material to cover.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
Sexual harassment awareness(seriously)
Seconding this. Teach the boys that letting the girls use the tools is a good thing. If you do hardware/mechanical projects, please pay attention to the class and call the boys on their sexism. It may have gotten better since I was in high school (graduated 5 years ago), but I remember lots of boys doing the mechanical stuff for the girls, sometimes due to misguided chivalry but often plain old sexism.
open source modern art: laser taggi
I teach an introduction to robotics internship to some high-schoolers every summer. 6 hours a day, 4 days a week for 5 weeks.
We go through:
- basic physics e&m (what a charge is, how it flows)
- circuits (series and parallel restistors etc.)
- DLD (digital logic design) what is a prototyping board, hooking up transistors, LEDs, 555 timers, logic gates
- some analog circuits (what an h-bridge is so their boards can actually power a motor, how transistors work so they can use IR phototransistors etc.)
- computer architecture (so they can program a PIC)
Once they get to the DLD, it's hard to stop them.
By the end of the summer they've built a robot that can autonomously follow a line on the floor.
Sounds simple, but there is no lego kit here. They build everything from scratch.