Junior Engineers: Building with Circuits and C++

Impact to My Classroom

# of Students Impacted: 20

Mrs. Nancy Garfien,

     First, I would like to thank you for funding this project.  Because of your funding we have begun a program that will be further refined for the duration of my tenure at Immokalee Middle School for now and well into the future.  The funds went to purchase the following pieces of equipment:

Elegoo Uno R3 Project Most Complete Starter Kit x 29

CRST Heavy Duty Surge Protector x 3

Creality Sonic Pad in Klipper

Creality Bed Level Touch x2

SUNLU Filament Dryer box for 3D 

LAFVIN Nano V3.0, Nano Board x3

COMGROW 25 pc MK 8 Ender 3 V2 Nozzle Pack

NovaMaker PETG Black Filament

      The Elegoo UNO R3 and the LAFIN NANO v3.0 boards are the heart of this project, they represent the hardware that the students use the Arduino IDE to program using C++ functionality into.  The CRST Heavy Duty Surge Protectors were not initially labeled for purchase in the initial writing of the grant; however, they became necessary to purchase when we realized that the present architecture in the building was insufficient to allow the students to power the computers the Arduino IDE ran upon and simultaneously run the 3D printers that are also connected to this project.   The SUNLU Filament dryer and the COMGROW 25 pc Mk 8 Ender 3 V2 Nozzle packs were purchased with money remaining from the grant as we have always maintained that the real goal of this grant was to have the children make objects with the printers and electrify them so that they could make sculptures that lit up or moved or moving cars that could be remote controlled.

     During the execution of this project we ran into some problems.  One major problem was that the student’s computers were implemented in such a way that we would download the Arduino IDE, and the computer would erase it on reboot.  As such much of the first semester of the program we made very limited progress as downloading the IDE over and over again wasted a lot of our afterschool time.  After reaching out and working with Mr. Ryan Westberry Science Director at CCPS we finally were able to convince the technology department in Collier County Public Schools to make the software we need a part of the student suite and upon returning from Spring Break, we were finally able to download the software that we needed without having it autodelete from the student’s laptops.   It was at this time that we were able to begin teaching the students the basics of circuits and explaining to them how the code we had developed spoke to the hardware and produced the results the students see.  With the express permission of the 6YFN club run through the Boys Town and Girls town association, I have enclosed pictures of the students next to their projects and learning to code.  This was the first integration of both the hardware specifically the lighting of the LED’s that came with the kit with the software counterparts the students were learning to write.  They had to learn to turn the LED’s on, off, adjust the duration of the LEDS in the on state, and were then integrating the blinking of the LED’s with old Morse code to send and receive simple messages such as SOS which would be represented with the following blink pattern (long “—” for long flash, “ “ for off state, and “-“ for short flash.

“-- -- -- , - - - , -- -- --”

     We did run into two long-term problems that will require time to correct.  First it became very apparent that for this project to continue we would have to develop a suite of how to videos so that children who missed sessions could work independently and at their own pace in order to catch up to the rest of the class.  This way the majority of the students who attended are not held up by students who failed to attend the session.  This will represent a major expansion of this program for the next year and a way in which I will need to work on improving the presentation of material to the students in order for us to find greater success in this next year.  This will also allow us to get much deeper into the toolset that comes with the hardware suite.  Unfortunately, due to time constraints this year I project we will only get to servo’s which represents the fifth tools in the suite of 25 that comes with the kit.  The second expansion of this project will involve the 3d printers.  We have always wanted the children to use their skills to electrify their own creations and to make things such as small air boats, small cars, and maybe even dancing Groot type of figures.  In order to accomplish this for next year we will also have to develop a suite of videos on 3d modeling for the same reason that the absence of this tool has set us back in that the students who were not there have to be instructed and this takes time away from the instruction of the children who were there from the beginning.   We also need to direct the modeling a little bit more so that children who aren’t artistically inclined aren’t buried in a somewhat intimidating job of making things look “good” instead of focusing on function which is of course much more productive.  To this end we will probably need to build blueprint of basic items that the children will learn how to wire.  One of the talked about and planned models will be the Pokemon, “Pokeball” as models of this already exist and can be easily modified in order to house the Arduino and the power source.

     Although we did encounter a great deal of problems in this project, the fundamental reality is that this project has right now taught a group of young people a bit about 3d programming and hardware architecture.  No project is without problems when starting.  Some of those problems in hindsight were obvious, others were not.  Although this first year wasn’t as successful as we had originally envisioned, we have a plan, we know where we need to go for next year, and we anticipate moving forward a much more successful year now that the main obstacle that has hindered us has been removed.   The fact that we are going to have accomplished wiring up and controlling LED’s, capacitors, basic buttons, digital and analogue voltage channels, breadboards, and Servos I think is a very big win for our first year when considering that we have had a quarter of the time to actually use these pieces of hardware.  It is my distinct hope that you will have found this project to have been worth your money and again the successes that we have had from this point on will be entirely due to the support we have received from you.

Thank you,

Anthony Fernando

Enclosed:  Examples of Student work (photographs)