Arduino coding in the classroom

I recently started using Arduino boards in my physics teaching. I was looking for practical projects for an Applied Science class – which is a small-sized technical section of our school with 10 hours of science a week. It’s in the program to study some electronics, and although coding isn’t included, I feel it my duty to teach the basics. Programming requires a special way of thinking, with its specific structure using loops and variables. It’s a language on its own. Practicing it at a young age gives you an advantage on future learning abilities.

The choice of the Arduino board was quite straightforward for me, although Raspberry Pi would also do the job in a different way. Arduino is a microcontroller board barely bigger than a bank card, that connects to all sorts of electronics, sensors, and motors. It collects data in its environment, processes it, and operates a motor or display accordingly. It is cheap, versatile and you find plenty of tutorials online. Light and music setups, robots, automatic watering, smoke detector, persistence of vision globe, lie detector, portable guide for visually impaired people, rotating light-sensitive solar panels, electronic games… the possibilities are endless.

Programming an Arduino board can be done either in the Arduino IDE language, itself very similar to C++, or through blocks of words that will then be translated into computer language for you. The many programs available on the Internet usually contain a description for each line of coding. It makes it easy to understand, use, and modify to meet your own needs.

To demonstrate the potential of teaching with this microcontroller board, I present in this poster my pupils’ projects. I also show how one can draw, code (in blocks or text), and simulate electronic circuits with Tinkercad, a web-based designing dashboard.