Just Sunday I was at Barnes & Noble and the local high school robotics
club were demonstrating their projects there.  They had some very
impressive (large) robots.  I suspect the club must have had significant
funding, probably from local foundations.  I don't have any contact
information for them but it was the Dow High School in Midland,
Michigan.,

I am involved in the electronics club of another high school in town,
although we don't limit membership to only the high school.  I have been
teaching the kids PIC programming and they are taking to it like ducks
to water.

They have already built up the traditional blink an LED circuit on
solderless breadboards and programmed them.  It was incredible how
little guidance it took.
https://gitlab.com/33EV-GM1/dsPIC-presentations/raw/master/02-StartingWithM=
PLAB/02-StartingWithMPLAB.pdf
https://gitlab.com/33EV-GM1/dsPIC-presentations/raw/master/03-AdvancedBlink=
AnLED/03-AdvancedBlink.pdf

Tonight they are going to build up a development board they will use to
go farther
https://gitlab.com/33E-simple/dsPIC-EL-GM
https://gitlab.com/E-WCC/dsPIC-EL_Build_Instructions/raw/master/tmp/en-US/p=
df/dsPIC-EL-GM--Construction_Instructions-en-US.pdf

In our case we chose the PIC rather than the Arduino because part of
their objective is to run experiments in a high altitude balloon and
size/weight/power considerations make the PIC more attractive.  We will
probably use a Raspberry Pi for some ground based components.

The club was able to get some generous donations from a local Rotary
Club and similar outfits so there is sufficient resource to provide the
club members with the necessary bits and pieces.  We meet in the Physics
lab so there is space to build stuff.  We did get a fair number of
soldering stations but the number of members who showed up exceeded our
expectations so we have a bit of an issue there.

We did start out with an exercise to fish out what the kids were really
interested in doing.  It was a bit surprising that the big hitter was to
"build something then program it".

The kids were grinning ear to ear when they made their LED flash, even
bigger grins when I gave them more parts and told them to just play.
The older kids have often had C++ in class, younger ones sometimes VB.
But the more experienced kids help out the younger ones.

Kids these days are really, really smart if you give them a chance.

--McD




On Tue, 2015-11-10 at 17:24 +0100, Kevin McGuinness wrote:
> Hello PIClist,
>=20
> We have set up a local computer club for children between the ages of 7 a=
nd
> 17. The idea is for beginners to start off by playing with Scratch before
> moving on to more games with Python. We would really like to give the kid=
s
> a chance to program LEDs or maybe even a robot.
>=20
> I've heard of the robot Thymio and I've seen that the Raspberry Pi can be
> used to program a motor/robot as well. Have you had experience with these
> or other robotics projects?
>=20
> Or otherwise, what do you think are the best ways to teach LED/robotics
> programming to kids?
>=20
> Thanks,
>=20
> Kevin


--=20
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