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Teaching Arduino in Seattle

dcuartiellesApril 7th, 2011

Andrew Davidson is running a high school class named “Intro to Computer Science” at Roosevelt High School, in the Seattle Public School district of Seattle, Washington. His relationship to the Arduino project goes back to Ivrea, where he used to work at the very same location where we created the small blue boards.

At his course, students will be introduced to programming using Scratch and Processing, and to physical computing using Arduino boards. As Andrew mentions on the official course announcement:

Through a project-oriented approach, students will create a variety of software applications and systems. By collaborating in a hands-on environment, students will learn problem solving, software design and programming, debugging strategies, and the fundamentals of computer science (data structures, procedures, and algorithms). We will use a variety of programming systems that are not only creative and highly interactive, but also provide an engaging way to learn the practice of software engineering.

Students will work on projects (both individual and team) in the areas of graphics and games, animation and art, electronics systems, and interactive fashion. The software used to create the projects will be open-source packages such asScratchProcessingArduino, and LilyPad.

We really want to reach out to highschools and, if possible at even lower levels. We are preparing something new for this (but we are not going to reveal it yet). We want to help to all of you preparing curriculum for schools in making the best out of teaching. For the time being, if you are in doubt whether it is possible to teach with open source tools to kids, just take a look at Andrew’s course, there is even a calendar showing how to structure the assignments over several weeks (please note that, at the time of posting this, the Arduino assignments weren’t there yet).

Read more about Andrew, check out the class syllabus, and the list of resources.

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