We are reaching some of the most underserved youth in our community to develop the core computational thinking skills needed for them to participate fully in STEM-related fields. One of the events was making dancing snowmen with Arduino microcontrollers and servos, which Community Ambassador, Kim Naples, did extensive preparation for. She sought the assistance and collaboration from two people from the Champaign-Urbana Community Fab Lab. Kim also developed some teen-focused curriculum for coding ardunios (more information can be found on the “Nuts and Bolts” page).
The teens first built the snowmen around the servo using pom-poms, pipe cleaners, and glue guns. Once that was finished, the teens over to the laptops, plugged the servos into the Arduinos, and opened up the Arduino coding program. One teen was a particularly fast learner. After a few minutes, she was able to show a librarian, a volunteer, and a fellow teen how to code Arduinos without the trainers help. We’ve seen similar experiences at other sites, where increasingly evidence of successful completion includes participants training other participants on skills they just learned themselves. This is a foundational capacity building goal of the project — community developing the capacity to increasingly do 21st century programming on their own initiative.
Here are some photos from the event:
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- Construction of the snowmen.
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- Teenager, Kim, showing librarian, Joel Spencer, how to code her Arduino snowman.
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- (Above and below) Teens working together to figure out the numbers needed in the code to get the snowman to move at the desired angle.
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