英語で電気工作教室 Week 6
This was the final week of our English and Electronics Course (英語で電気工作教室). So it was time to put everything together and review what we have learned so far!
It was also the time to put the A into our STEAM course. As you my know STEAM in an education sense is an acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Maths. So hving concentrated on the STEM part in the previous five classes, today we decorated our robots. Marker pens, scissors, hot glues, crayons were made available and the children were free to give their robot a personality.
This student decided to turn his robot into a cat. Meow!
We then connected everything the robot, arduino and controller together using jumper wires. After quickly testing that everything was working as expected we had a lot of fun animating our robots. Check out the video of the above cat robot....
And then the course was finished. We boxed the robots, Arduinos and various components for the children to take home and show their parents.
If you'd like to find out more about future upcoming English and Electronics course please check the dedicated webpage:
https://www.englishpool.net/course/english-and-electronics
Thank you for reading!
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英語で電気工作教室 Week 5
If week 4 was about assembling the robot from the SparkFun Pan/Tilt kit, then week 5 was about getting the completed assembly mounted and working.
This week, we were going to be sawing, drilling, soldering and tinkering!
After cutting a length of wood to act as the base, they decided they wanted to add some colour to the wood. Not sure if a whiteboard marker is the best thing to colour wood with, but it gave it a nice vivid red colour!
We then mounted our completed robots onto the base with a couple of small screws. Next it was on to making the robot controller, this consists of two potentiometers (aka pots) fixed to a wooden support. So again after cutting the various bits we glued them together with hot glue. Once this had set, we were then able to drill two holes in the top to allow the potentiometers to be attached but not before we had soldered the leads to the pots!
This actually proved be quite scary for the children, I think the heat of the soldering iron and seeing it melt metal spooked them a little Anyway once all the leads were attached it ws time to connect everything togther. So that meant running the leads from the potentiometers to plus and minus power rails on a breadboard and then running the remaining center lead to the Arduino. We then repeated this with the servos on the breadboard.
Once all those steps were completed and checked it was time to upload the program we had created on mBlock to the Arduino using a USB cable. You can see the completed robot in action in the video below.
https://youtube.com/shorts/HZgOCn6FISM?feature=share
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英語で電気工作教室 Week 4
Week 4 was all about building the robot. We are using the ROB-14391 pan/tilt bracket from SparkFun as the base of our robots. It is actually designed for mounting a camera on, hence the pan and tilt functions but for us it provides some really cool movement along two axes.
The ROB-14391 comes with all the parts needed to construct it, including the servo motors. So today was all about following instructions, and fiddling with tiny, tiny screws. Needless to say it was quite hands on so I didn't have a chance to take many photos.
Next week we will connecting the completed robot to the arduino, and making a base for it to stand on.
The printed instructions in the kit consist of six diagrams, in the style of Ikea assembly instructions, and were a little dificult to follow. Fortunately I had made a video showing how to build the ROB-14391 a few months ago, so we were able to watch this in the class to help us along.
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英語で電気工作教室 Week 3
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
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英語で電気工作教室 Week 2
A quick report on week two of our English and Electronics (英語で電気工作教室):
We had a quick review of the content covered in week one especially the names of the various components (switch, light, wire, battery etc) and the idea of an electrical circuit needing everything to be connected in orde for it work. This was helped by completing a worksheet to identify the valid circuits.
We then looked more closely at LEDs, I had a selection of red, green, blue, orange, yellow and pink LEDs for us to use. But what do LEDs need to keep them happy? That's right, a resistor. So we looked a various resistors and using a color code chart were able to read the values. For example red, green, brown bands indicate it's a 250Ω resisitor, brown, black, brown band equal a 100Ω rsistor and brown, black, black bands will indicate a 10Ω resistor. We used a magnifying glass to help see the bands!
We then moved on creating a bank of buttons to control the various colour LEDs. For this we used an electrical breadboard, so firstly we looked at how the breadboard is wired before using nippers to trim the buttons, LEDs and the all important resistors before placing them in the breadboard to create valid circuits.
Once we had checked that the various LEDs were inserted the right way round, and all the circuits were working we proceeded to push the buttons to light up the LEDs. We either called out colors and the children had to press theright button or we made up modified color songs and they had to follow along!
We finished by discussing what we had learned today, and packing the completed circuits in a bag so the children could take them home and play. Next week we will be attempting to automate those buttons by connecting everything to an Arduino.
You can also watch a short video clip of the LEDs lighting up as a student pushes the buttons following my commands (more or less...)
https://youtube.com/shorts/mwYyK7sEMEE?feature=share
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英語で電気工作教室 Week 1
A brief report on week one of our English and Electronics (英語で電気工作教室) class:
We started with introductions and a safety talk then we looked at various components we will use in the course, for example switches, lights, LEDs, motors, batteries, wire etc. After trying to remember the names of these components in English we completed a worksheet about the symbols used to identify these parts in a circuit diagram.
We then looked at how electricity flows around a circuit. We identified the positive and negative ends of different batteries and measured their voltages using a multimeter---good chance to practice numbers. The idea of a complete circuit was a little difficult to grasp...all the components must be connected to each other to form a circle...with no gaps!
To reinforce the idea of a complete circuit we used the Snap Circuits board to quickly create a circuit using a battery and a light. We then expanded this to include a motor, push switch, on-off switch and an LED.
We then finished the lesson reviewing what we had learned so far, and looking forward to week two!
Robot Time
As part of our English and Electronics course (英語で電気工作教室) I've had great fun building these mini-robots using only an Arduino Uno, Sparkfun's Pan/Tilt Bracket and some connecting wires.
While the bracket build can be little complicated for young students, there is a real sense of acheivement once completed. Hooking the bracket up to the Arduino is as simple as making sure the servos have got power and then connecting the control wires to the correct ports on the Arduino.A few cable ties help keep everything tidy! The pan/tilt bracket really needs to be mounted on something or it will just keep falling over. In this case I used a piece of wood to mount both the pan/tilt bracket and the Arduino Uno.
On the software side, the stuff that controls how the robot moves, we would usually use the mBlock application. This is a block based coding system which is easy for young minds (and old!) to understand. Although in this video, which is intended as a demonstration, I used the Arduino Servo Library and modified the basic sweep program.
The slowly pulsating LED lights are not controlled by the Arduino, they have their own 'chip' and were salvaged from a children's toy. As this is intended to be used as a demonstartion I thought the lights added a bit more excitement!
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ポール先生の英語で電気工作教室 (English & Electronics)
電気工作が得意なポールと一緒にロボットを作ってみませんか？
工作しながらプログラミングも英語も習えちゃうお得なコースです。通常の英語教室と違い、年間を通してのプログラムではなく、2か月間で全6回のプログラムになっております。1回目を修了した後は、次のレベルのプログラムに進めます。もちろん1回のみの受講もOK！プログラミンってどんな事？英会話のレッスンってどんな感じ？と思っている方には是非！体験して頂きたいプログラムです。
レッスンは【STEAM教育】の考え方を基に構成いたしました。
S：Science科学
T：Technology技術
E：Engineering工学
A：Arts芸術
M：Mathematics数学の要素を英語レッスンにとりいれています。
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How to Build the ROB-14391 Pan/Tilt Bracket
In this video Paul shows you how to construct the Sparkfun ROB-14391 pan/tilt bracket. The kit, which is widely available, is an affordable and relatively easy introduction to building something with servo motors. We particually like that all the parts needed are included in the kit, including the actual servos! All you need is to after assembling it is to hook it up to an Arduino and you have a functioning pan/tilt mechanism.
This forms part of a new course coming soon from englishpool.
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