Newest Angels in the STEAM Lab

This year, all of the grade 8's will have an opportunity to go through 10 weeks in the new Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Math (STEAM) program at LFA. The new class of grade 8's that just started are learning to program using Arduino microcontrollers. For many of these students, this is the first experience with programming outside of drag-and-drop languages like Scratch or Mindstorms. 

Each student is working in a group of four but each one of them has their own microcontroller and will be doing their own coding with the support of their group and Mr. Chow. They will be using resistors, hookup wire, LEDs (output) and a photoresistor (sensor input) on a breadboard attached to the microcontroller. They will be using loops / iteration, conditional operators, variables, proper variable naming conventions and a tidy code structure to receive an input from the photoresistor sensor and use that input to flash some LED lights.

There is no sample program for them to look at or copy. They will learn all the skills they need, then they will use computational problem solving to combine various lessons to solve a problem. More importantly, it is a lot of fun, the LED lights are pretty and they have many different colours they can chose from.