https://instagram.com/p/739e2pA5Z7/?taken-by=funvill
https://instagram.com/p/739UfLg5Zm/?taken-by=funvill
Thank you @Janet @lukecyca and @Shane for the help running the workshop.
8 out of the 10 people that signed up on event bright, showed up. Each donated the suggested about of $10, for a total of $80. I donated $40 of that money to VHS. I also sold a bunch of LED strips for $12 for non members and $6 for VHS members. 4x Arduino uno’s were purchased from @iMakeRobots vending machine.
Of the 8 people, 2 peoples laptops would not install the FTDI drivers. One of them used my laptop (in application locked mode) and the other shared with his son. We still are having issues getting the drivers install on everyone computer. I would have expected most of these issues to be resolved by the latest update of the Arduino IDE.
With the exception of the 2 laptops that didn’t install the drivers. We had everyone running the blink sketch within 15 mins. This is a huge improvement over the last Arduino workshop that took ~2 hours to get people up and running. A smaller class size and the help from @Janet @lukecyca and @Shane made a huge difference.
As we progressed thought the workshop I realized that I should spend more time teaching programming fundamentals like the “IF”, “FOR” statements and variable deceleration. The theory part about “what is binary” and “how to count in binary” was lost by most people.
People had a lot of fun making things blink, Most people didn’t care about making a clock they just wanted to play with the colors and make things blink. Next time I run this workshop I don’t think i will include the clock portion of the workshop and just show more ways to make the LEDs blink.
With Halloween coming up, I think my next workshop will be about how to embed LEDs into costumes.