On Thorough Testing

Today I had the pleasure of attending / helping to host a session about Arduino as put on by my friends at Solarbotics.

These guys do awesome work in both supporting the local Robotics/Electronics community in Calgary (among other places) as a supplier and as an educator. I have had many trips out there to make sure that a piece of hardware or concept that I was using were being used correctly.

For all of you aspiring or prospective educators, check out their well built and cost-effective Sketchboard for Arduino fun.

Today's session allowed me to test out some of the Arduino Theory presentations with a couple of beginners and a couple of experts.

To no one's surprise, the experts found some holes in what I had created and the beginners found some errors in the presentations as well. Those holes have been fixed in Arduino 01-04.

What I took away from it is that even at my stage of being very new to this system I come with some assumptions including how a breadboard works. This is something that is very simple but that could throw a beginner for a loop. the main problem this illuminated was that the earlier units in my course this year are going to need to be slightly longer as I may need to sneak in some foundational skills from one area, such as breadboarding, into units where they don't explicitly belong, such as programming.
For anyone not aware of how a breadboard works, Colin Cunningham has one of the most informative lessons on them through his Collin's Lab Series on YouTube.

He also has a fantastic video about building an old-school breadboard.

With this being the case and my programming module being at a place where I can leave it, until the robotics project credits at least, I am going to tackle these electronics lessons next. Luckily, those were some of my more well developed assignments and sections so revamping them for 2015/2016 should be relatively simple.

This event was also a lesson that reminds anyone developing curriculum and lessons that your assumptions are invisible to you. Nothing is as humbling as watching something that you created to be simple and self-explanatory need significant explanation.

Good thing it's July and not September I guess.

Cheers.
Way