A quick look at what we covered in week 3 of the English and Electronics course:

After a quick review of last week's contents and checking that the LEDs were working as expected when pushing the switches along to a colour song, we decided that the resistors we had used were too low a value as when connecting to the Arduino we'd be working with 5v and not the 3V supplied by the batteries. So we changed all the resistors to a higher value!

With this job completed it was time to connect the circuits to the Arduino UNO microprocessors. This entailed removing each push switch and connecting a jumper lead from a pin on the Arduino to the LED on the breadboard. We also removed the battery pack connection and connected the negative lead to the GND pin on the Arduino.

Next it was time for programming. After looking at all the available options for a programming interface for the Arduino, including Visuion, Ardublock, and miniBloq I decided that the mBlock visual interface would be the best fit for elementary aged students. It's based on the Scratch interface which many children seem to familiar with and it comes with support for connecting to the Arduino.

After explaining that we xcan control each pin on the Arduino using the program, and that we needed the pin to be set to 'high' to turn the LED on and 'low' to turn the LED off I challenged them to create a program that would light the LEDs in the order of the colour song we had used with the push switches. The completed code is below:

We then uploaded this to the Arduino UNO, which is such a breeze with the mBlock software that the children soon mastered the art of changing their programs and seeing how it changed the lighting patterns.

Finally we filmed a demonstration of the program in action which you can watch in the short video below!

https://youtube.com/shorts/1cRDnZWfdgw?feature=share