Planet Arduino

Schools have recently had to make a sudden and seismic shift in the way they teach. As both educators and students get used to remote learning, the onus is now more on parents to support their children through homeschool, and that means parents themselves need support. At Arduino Education, we want to help you and your children by making remote learning experiences as smooth (and fun!) as possible.

LEARNING ELECTRONICS & CODING AT HOME

As parents to children aged 11-plus, learning electronics and coding with them at home may not be something you’d ever think you’d be doing. But don’t worry, it really isn’t as daunting as it sounds, and electronics and coding skills are crucial in the world your children are growing up in.

ABOUT ELECTRONICS & CODING

Learn coding and the basic concepts of electricity together with your child at home with the Arduino Student Kit. It comes with all of the electronic components you need, as well as step-by-step instructions for how to start coding. But what is coding, exactly? Well, it’s simply the language that computers understand. It’s how we tell a computer what to do. In the Student Kit, you get pre-programmed code to help you understand how it works. You could also explore drag-and-drop visual coding such as Scratch to help you get a better understanding of what coding is.

LEARN ELECTRONICS & CODING AT HOME WITH THE ARDUINO STUDENT KIT

The Student Kit is a hands-on, step-by-step homeschool starter kit for children aged 11-plus that will help them get started with the basics of electronics and coding at home. You’ll get all the hardware and software you need for one person, as well as complete guidance, step-by-step lessons, exercises, and a logbook where you can answer the lesson questions and find solutions. 

HOW THE KIT HELPS YOU HOMESCHOOL YOUR CHILDREN

This is your hands-on, step-by-step remote learning learning tool that will help your child learn the basics of programming, coding, and electronics at home. As a parent, you don’t need any prior knowledge or experience as you are guided through step-by-step. The kit is linked directly into the curriculum so you can be confident that your children are learning what they should be, and it provides the opportunity for them to become confident in programming and electronics. You’ll also be helping them learn vital skills such as critical thinking and problem-solving.

WHAT’S IN THE KIT?

• All the basic electronic components you need to complete each lesson
• Access to an online platform which helps children take their first steps into the world of electronics and inventions
• Nine step-by-step lessons with up to 25 hours of learning time
• Two open-ended projects. These projects don’t have a right or wrong answer – the solution to the project question is unique to each individual
• A digital logbook that students can use to annotate their exercises, observations, and experiments. Parents can also use the logbook to find solutions

WHAT DOES THE KIT HELP TO TEACH?

By using the kit at home, you’ll be mirroring what your children would learn in their classroom. As well as how to code, the kit teaches:

• Basic concepts of electricity
• Safety 
• Schematics
• Writing code
• Controlling a circuit
• Coding concepts
• Controlling a servo motor
• Producing sounds, tones, and music
• Measuring the intensity of light 

WHAT YOU NEED

You’ll need to purchase one Student Kit per child – you can either find your country’s distributor or buy the kit online. To use the kit, you’ll need a desktop computer, laptop or tablet device which has a compatible operating system and meets minimum requirements for downloading the Arduino software. Find out more about this here.

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COVID-19 is playing a huge role in everything we do. With schools closed and a large number of countries under total lockdown, we want to support educators, parents, and students with hands-on electronic, programming, and coding lessons from home.

NEW: The Arduino Education remote learning platform

We have been working on several initiatives to support remote learning. Our aim is for children to still have access to hands-on STEAM lessons even whilst they can’t attend school. We are pleased to announce that to support homeschooling needs we have launched a remote learning platform.

What will you find on the remote learning platform?

This platform will deliver online support to educators, parents and students so they have the tools they need to feel comfortable and confident in completing successful STEAM lessons at home. On a weekly basis we will post new helpful material including video tutorials, live sessions, and extra support with resources, ideas, and tips.

We will also be hosting weekly live sessions on Arduino EduVision. You can find all details, dates and times, and book the next coming session here. 

All the activities and tutorials in our remote learning platform currently support using the Arduino Starter Kit and Arduino Certification as learning tools in the home.

18 tips and tricks for educators new to remote learning

Many schools are set up for some kind of remote learning, but there are an equal number for whom this is a whole new world. It’s also true that while you probably have lesson plans ready for the upcoming semesters, it’s a whole different ball game to suddenly put all these lessons online without disrupting any learning. These 18 tips and tricks will help you if you’re new to remote learning.

We hope that Arduino Education programs can support you in enabling students to learn, innovate, and succeed at home by making complex technology simple to understand and use.

Keep safe

All best from Arduino Education Team

During Bett Show 2020, Arduino will launch the Arduino Education learning evolution: four new STEAM products for students in lower secondary school through to university. Arduino Education will also announce a partnership with the Fraunhofer Initiative: “Roberta – Learning with Robots” in Germany.

Arduino Education‘s latest products — CTC GO! Motions Expansion Pack, Engineering Kit Rev2, Arduino Education Starter Kit, and IoT Starter Kit — will be unveiled at Bett and available in Q1. These new products complement the existing portfolio, which includes the Science Kit, CTC GO!, CTC 101, Arduino Starter Kit, and Certification program.

Arduino CEO Fabio Violante comments: “We are delighted to announce four new products which will expand STEAM learning for lower secondary to university students. Our technology, programming, and curriculum content are creative tools — just like brushes and paint — that students can use as they become part of our next generation of scientists and artists.”

CTC GO! Motions Expansion Pack (Age: 14+)

Build on your secondary school students’ STEAM knowledge with more complex programming concepts that develop computational thinking and 21st-century skills.

For educators who have taken their students through the CTC GO! – Core Module, the Motions Expansion Pack builds on what they have already learned about how to use technology as a tool and how to apply that knowledge in the real world. The Motions Expansion Pack challenges students to go a step further in computing and design while introducing them to motors and transmission mechanisms such as pulleys and gear concepts that develop their logical reasoning, hands-on building skills, and problem-solving skills. Educators get all the teaching support they need with webinars, videos, guides, and direct contact with an expert.

Engineering Kit Rev2 (Age: 17+)

Challenge upper secondary school and university students and help them develop hands-on engineering skills.

Educators can challenge engineering students and help them develop physical engineering skills with the Arduino Engineering Kit Rev2. Featuring cutting-edge technology, the kit is a practical, hands-on tool that demonstrates key concepts, core aspects of mechatronics, and MATLAB and Simulink programming. Developed in partnership with MathWorks, The Engineering Kit Rev2 is ideal for advanced high school and college students, the three projects teach the basics of engineering — plus they’re fun to do! 

Education Starter Kit (Age: 11+)

Learn electronics and get started with programming in your classroom step-by-step — no experience necessary!

Educators can teach lower secondary school students the basics of programming, coding, and electronics. No prior knowledge or experience is necessary as the kits guide educators through step-by-step, they are well-supported with teacher guides, and lessons can be paced according to students’ abilities. The kit can be integrated throughout the curriculum, giving students the opportunity to become confident in programming and electronics with guided sessions and open experimentation. They’ll also learn vital 21st-century skills such as collaboration and problem-solving.

IoT Starter Kit (Age: 14+)

The first step into the world of connected objects has never been easier. 

Advanced secondary school and university students can get started with the Internet of Things quickly and easily. They’ll learn about using sensors; automation; logging, graphing and analyzing sensor data, and triggering events with serious technology made simple. The kit contains step-by-step tutorials for ten different projects – fun, creative experiments using real-life sensors.

In partnership with the Fraunhofer Initiative: “Roberta – Learning with Robots”

The dream team for classrooms worldwide: Arduino Education has officially partnered up with the Fraunhofer Initiative “Roberta – Learning with Robots.” The Arduino Uno WiFi Rev2 board, part of Arduino CTC GO!, joined the Open Roberta Lab, the biggest open-source coding platform developed in Europe.

The Arduino Uno WiFi Rev2 is the fourth Arduino board to be integrated into the Open Roberta Lab, which currently supports 13 robots and microcontrollers that enable children worldwide to adopt a playful approach to coding. The lab is the technological component of the Roberta Initiative, which was started by Fraunhofer IAIS in 2002. Eighteen years’ experience in STEM education, training teachers, and developing materials as well as launching the Open Roberta Lab in 2014 make Roberta a one-of-a-kind initiative in Germany and beyond, and the perfect partner for Arduino Education.

“Fraunhofer offers guaranteed quality, both on the technical level as well as for community support,” says Arduino CTO David Cuartielles. “There are a lot of synergies in our cooperation. Roberta is really meant for teachers to learn how to teach technology, and that’s also a key part of Arduino Education’s mission.”

“Open Roberta is developed as an open source platform to engage a community worldwide to join our mission. As a popular open source electronics platform, Arduino is the perfect match for us as it also motivates people all over the world to develop their own ideas and move from using to creating technology,” adds Thorsten Leimbach, head of business unit “Smart Coding and Learning” and Roberta manager at Fraunhofer IAIS.

Dream team for classrooms worldwide: Arduino Uno WiFi Rev2 for CTC GO! joins Open Roberta Lab, the biggest open source coding platform made in Europe.

The Arduino Uno WiFi Rev2 is the fourth Arduino board to be integrated into the Open Roberta Lab, which is currently supporting a total of 13 robots and microcontrollers to enable children worldwide to adopt a playful approach to coding. By “dragging and dropping” the colorful programming blocks called “NEPO” hundreds of thousands of users worldwide from more than 100 countries per year create their own programs to make their hardware come to life.

“Fraunhofer offers guaranteed quality, both on the technical level as well as for community support,” says Arduino CTO David Cuartielles. “There are a lot of synergies in our cooperation. Roberta is really meant for teachers to learn how to teach technology which is a key part of the Arduino Education’s mission.”

The CTC GO! – Core Module containing eight Arduino Uno WiFi Rev2 is supporting the joint mission of Open Roberta and Arduino in providing teachers with a getting started program including eight lessons, eight guided projects, and six self-guided projects that teach students how to use electronics and introduces them to programming and coding. The lessons increase in difficulty from the very basics all the way through to learning different programming capabilities and building circuits for different sensors and actuators. During the self-guided projects, students practice building structures and applying the knowledge acquired in the hands-on lessons to develop their critical thinking, creativity and problem solving skills in a collaborative manner.”

Arduino first joined Open Roberta in 2018, when the microcontrollers Arduino Uno, Nano, and Mega were integrated into the Open Roberta Lab. The lab is the technological component of the Roberta initiative, which was started by Fraunhofer IAIS in 2002. 18 years of experience in STEM education, training teachers and developing materials as well as launching the Open Roberta Lab in 2014 make Roberta a one of a kind initiative in Germany and beyond.

The Arduino Engineering Kit has been nominated as finalist for BETT Awards 2020 under the category “Higher Education or further education digital Services”.  22nd January, the contention will take place.

ABOUT THE BETT AWARDS

The Bett Awards are a celebration of the inspiring creativity and innovation that can be found throughout technology for education. The awards form an integral part of Bett each year, the world’s leading showcase of education technology solutions. The winners are seen to have excelled in ICT provision and support for nurseries, schools, colleges and special schools alike with a clear focus on what works in the classroom.

ABOUT THE NOMINATION:

The Arduino Engineering kit developed in partnership with Mathworks is aimed at higher education engineering students. It features hands-on projects that will cover system modelling, controls, robotics, mechatronics and other important engineering concepts.

Despite Arduino and Mathworks being some of the most widely used products in the engineering field all over the world, there wasn’t any product that was teaching how to integrate Matlab and Simulink software with Arduino hardware. Thus Arduino together with Mathworks, saw this as an opportunity to join forces to develop a learn-by-doing kit that provided real world example usage scenarios to teach both the software and engineering fundamentals of the following:

• Robotics
• Mechatronics
• control systems
• image and video processing
• physics, and mathematics

The kit is built on its own Education Learning Management System (LMS) with step-by-step instructions and lessons. It comes in a stackable toolbox for storage and years of reuse. The student will have access to a dedicated e-learning platform and other learning materials, including a one-year individual license for MATLAB and Simulink.

ARDUINO AT BETT:

Fabio Violante, Arduino’s CEO, says,  “We are delighted to feature a series of new Arduino Education programs at BETT 2020 which will expand STEAM learning for lower secondary to university students. Our technology, programming, and curriculum content are creative tools – just like brushes and paint – that students can use as they become part of our next generation of scientists and artists.”

How Arduino Education helped educator James Jones boost students’ 21st-century skills and robotics knowledge at 23 middle schools in Orlando, Florida. 

More and more teachers face the difficulty of instilling the right skills and knowledge, as well as a flexible mindset, that better prepare their students for future career opportunities.

“Today, students need to be thinking about careers in middle school,” Jones said. “If students wait until they are juniors or seniors in high school to decide, their options are already getting slim. Finding a direction in middle school allows for research, job shadowing, and internships in high school. This will translate into more jobs that require more of these skills as part of the daily workplace. This way they know what a career really looks like, instead of jumping into a job and finding out that they are miserable.”

The challenge: learning about careers you love at a young age

Many countries have recently approved changes in their curricula and education systems to allow earlier access to technology in the classroom. In Finland, technology education is not a separate subject but a cross-curricular, interdisciplinary topic studied within various classes. In Florida, the Workforce Education law requires that students explore their career options during grades 6-8, at ages 12 to 14.

How Arduino Education helped

Jones spent last summer looking for a solution to assist him the following semester. He wanted to think big and reach as many schools as possible in Orange County, so he applied for and won the Title IV grant through the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) program. He used the grant to fund 23 middle schools and chose Arduino Education’s products, CTC GO! Core Module and the Arduino Starter Kit, to improve students’ robotics, programming, and coding skills.

“This past summer we ran two weeks of camps for rising eighth-graders. It was a transition camp at our feeder high school,” Jones said. As an educator, he believes his students should not leave school with only basic knowledge of robotics and STEAM but a deeper and more concrete experience of real-world problem-solving. “More and more personal electronics have fewer buttons and more programming,” Jones said.

Jones asked  Pitsco Education – an official Arduino Education Partner – for extra support during his teaching experience. Pitsco “teaches both coding and circuitry concepts in a real-world manner. Along the way, students encounter numerous careers which might spark their interest in pursuing an occupation they hadn’t considered before. A few of the endless possibilities open to students include engineering and design in any field (computer science, electricity, chemistry, mechanics), programming, and even costuming and music production.”

Do you have an Arduino Education success story? We would love to hear it! your success story with Arduino Education!

Find out more about Arduino Education at arduino.cc/education

Since very early on I developed an interest in education. During my studies I worked as afterschool teacher in math, physics, chemistry, and languages. Shortly after graduating from my MSc in Engineering I became a teacher at the School of Arts and Communication at Malmo University, Sweden. For over a decade I worked in the creation of education programmes for the university, looking at how to introduce technology transversely as part of several subjects within undergraduate, graduate, and postgraduate education.

Back in 2012, I realised at the time that almost no one was addressing the needs of educators when introducing curriculum. Therefore, I decided that we had to put educators at the center of our concept and help them find creative ways to use technology in the classroom. 

As we now are approaching 2020 I am very proud of where this has taken us. 

We have managed to bring Arduino Education programs into the classrooms in a large number of countries with great success, and not least with the help from all of you — our trade partners around the world. 

We rely on you to be our faces in the market and also understand how we need to step up in our offering to make sure you are equipped to bring Arduino Education to market and give the best support to the teachers.

The Arduino Education team has been expanding the past year and we now have a strong, creative and dedicated team to make sure we deliver relevant education programs, content, training and support.

Every single day we build on our vision in wanting  to make technology accessible to everyone and put it into the hands of every student and educator.

There is still a long way to go — we are on an amazing journey and this is just the beginning. The world of technology is constantly changing and new technologies keep showing their faces. Hence why it is so very important that we work hard to make students of today aware of technology and give them confidence in working with it.

Formal education is going through a strong transformation due to the digitalization of many aspects of contemporary society. If we look at the future classroom, we see technology not just as a tool to learn about, but as a system to enhance lots of processes that currently stop us from building a better interaction between teachers, students, and their families. Technology will help us accessing knowledge in better ways right at the time we need it. Assessing the student’s learning process will be easier and more personalized. We will be able of scaling pedagogical models that schools are currently only dreaming of. It will be possible to make cross-age study groups, where students will join based on their interests. Teachers will have access to tools that will help them see at once the student’s progress and needs. Student mobility will be a matter of transferring a file between schools. 

While the future is there, a few steps ahead, we still have to walk the path. At Arduino we look forward to being your partner in reaching that future, one step at a time. 

Let us change the world by making technology accessible to everyone and put it into the hands of every student and educator.

This year, Maker Faire Shenzhen 2019 will be focusing on the theme “To the Heart of Community, To the Cluster of Industry”. With a full chain events for technological innovations, you can look forward to the Maker Summit Forum, Maker Booths (includes highlights and performances), as well as Innovation workshops. […]

Read more on MAKE

The post 3 Reasons You Should Register For Maker Faire Shenzhen Now appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.

The Arduino Certification Program (ACP) is an Arduino initiative to officially certify users at different levels and confirm their expertise in key areas. Certifications are offered at three tiers — enthusiasts, educators and professionals — which have been identified as the largest Arduino user groups through extensive feedback from the community.

And today, we are excited to announce the availability of the initial Arduino certification: Arduino Fundamentals, which is the first release of the ACP. Access to the exam leading to the certification can be purchased either in combination with the Arduino Starter Kit or as a standalone exam.

The Arduino Certification: Fundamentals Exam is a structured way to enhance and validate your Arduino skills, and receive official recognition as you progress. Anyone interested in engaging with Arduino through a process that involves study, practice, and project building is encouraged to pursue this official certificate.

Developed in consultation with leading technology curriculum, interaction design, and electronic engineering professionals, the Arduino Certification: Fundamentals Exam assesses skills based on exercises comprised of practical tasks from the Arduino Starter Kit.

The official assessment covers three main subjects: theory and introduction to Arduino, electronics, and coding. During the exam, you will be asked to answer 36 questions of varied format and difficulty in 75 minutes.

Questions will test your knowledge on the following topics:

• Electricity
• Reading circuits and schematics
• Arduino IDE
• Arduino boards
• Frequency and duty cycle
• Electronic components
• Programming syntax and semantics
• Programming logic

The certification is currently only available in the US, but will be opened in more countries during 2019. If you’d like to learn more about Arduino Fundamentals, download the user guide. Additional information can also be found here.

Aside from all the product announcements at Bett, we’re excited to unveil a new annual initiative from the Arduino Education team to keep the community up-to-date on contests and exhibitions, suggest experiments, and highlight educational products and events of relevance within a selected topic.

The Arduino Education thematic years calendar is a unique way to involve our passionate educators and students, and work together to achieve something on a much larger scale.

For 2019, we have decided to take our efforts from the classroom to outer space.

2019 Is the Year of Space

Educators from all over the world have been using space as a context to build inspirational education resources. Different space agencies, through dissemination activities, have reached out to schools and universities trying to inspire students to become the next generation of scientists and engineers. Robots, satellites the size of a soda can, radio communication systems, weather monitoring devices, maps, amongst others, are examples of projects from those who want to bring the topic of space closer to the classroom. Arduino plays a major role in this, and therefore we want to contribute to the development and dissemination of future space scientists.

A Calendar of Activities

The Arduino Education thematic year calendar is not written in stone. We, in collaboration with a series of stakeholders, suggest a point of departure, but we will welcome your contributions. Please send us your event proposals via email to space.year@arduino.cc and we will share them. If you would like to make an announcement for an upcoming workshop, event, course, or if you are looking for partners to do so in your region, we will use the Arduino forum as a public way to discuss the possibilities.

Each thematic year will see the direct involvement of the community, both in proposing/running events related to the chosen topic and to select the theme for the following year. For starters, here is a brief snapshot of planned activities in the months to come:

January

• Official announcement at BETT London
• Balloon launching in Malmö, Sweden

February

• Balloon launching in Soria, Spain with Fundación Trilema
• Arduino instrumentation course for space experiments at Luleå University of Technology (LTU), Sweden

March

• Arduino Cardboard Keyboard workshop at SXSW
• Balloon launching in Aguascalientes, Mexico
• Worldwide Arduino Day celebrations
• 2019 Arduino Education hackathon rules announcement
• First tests of the Asuro robot v2 with German Aerospace Center (DLR)

Rest of the year

• Arduino experiments at the International Space Station (ISS) with Quest Robotics
• Arduino in Space hackathon
• Moon landing anniversary party
• Astronauts and cosmonauts hangout on the beach