The 20th of March opened up the world of Arduino to Grade 8 students as a test run was carried out to this open-source electronics prototyping platform for them. This comes after the resounding success of Robotics for Grade 5-7 which has opened up limitless horizons for the students to prepare them to take on the technology-oriented world of tomorrow.
Arduino was discovered at the GESS Dubai Fair attended this year by one of the Science teachers Sir Ibrahim Shabbir. After buying a kit for himself, which he thoroughly enjoyed assembling, he planned to bring this to the students of class 8 who were eager to learn something new.
The objective to begin this easy-to-use hardware and software is to let the students understand how the modern world works through sensors. Students continue to be fascinated by the working of computers that power everyday objects like microwave ovens and washing machines. Arduino answers questions that students pose regarding how robots and computers work.
The first session was also attended by a few ex-BHS students who are now NED students who were more than happy to play a part in the progress of their alma mater. The team of engineers worked hands-on to help students learn how to program and how to build amazing interactive objects. The pupils learnt to follow well-documented and simple instructions as they assembled their first project of LED lights.
Imran, one of the engineers shared, “This course is being taught in Engineering colleges and its wonderful that our students are being taught to be ahead of the fast-moving times.”
Arduino is intended for artists, designers, hobbyists and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or developing environments.
Arduino can sense its environment by receiving inputs from sensors, and interact with its environment by controlling lights, motors, or other actuators. The Arduino integrated development environment (IDE) is a cross-platform application written in Java, and is derived from the IDE for the Processing programming language and wiring projects. It can run independently and communicate with other software such as Flash, Processing, MaxMSP and more.
