Educational service at technikum29
Robots always have been interesting for children and teenagers. We foster this fascination to cultivate programming in a suitable way. As an alternative to virtual turtles at computer screens, in our workshops students can deal with physical objects. That's why we headline our workshops Physical Computing. It's by definition the construction of systems which interact with the physical world.
We also call this workshop Arduino lab. This is as we equip an Arduino microcontroller with sensors and moving components. We work with the Arduino uno and the Arduino Mega devices and program with the Arduino dialect of C/C++. Previous knowledge is not needed.
Workshops are structured by worksheets which contain tasks and partial sketches. Sketches are small Arduino program which are very well suitable to demonstrate basic programming principles.
With the Lego Robotics workshop we gained quite some experience in hosting workshops at technikum29. For pupils, it's always great fun to find creative solutions to given problems. This tightens the self-esteem. For the course, it's a natural source of internal differentiation. Teamplaying and up to date research questions are secondary products of participation in the course.