Arduino Workshop for Unravel The Code

I gave a 5 hour workshop/introduction to CircuitPython for the 2021 MICA class Unravel The Code. The goal was to give a taste of micro-controller programming with engaging interactions.

In 2021 we were able to have a series of workshops that built upon each other. Starting with some Grasshopper/Rhino to generate patterns from data, weaving on a floor loom, designing weaves in a AdaCAD, weaving them on a TC2 (digital jacquard loom), and finally integrating them with the Circuit Playground.

My workshop alternated short presentations with hands-on experimenting. The code built up to some interesting complexity that allowed interaction between the micro-controllers, and with humans. We had the students work in groups of 2-3, so they could help and learn from each other. I encouraged the students to break the code in pursuit of messing with it: they could simply reload the original and try again.

We used Circuit Playground Express BLE boards from Adafruit, as an excellent learning platform: it having many built-in devices. It also runs CircuitPython, which is much more approachable than the C++ of the usual Arduino IDE.

It's quite a challenge to address an audience that may have specifically avoided things like programming, while trying to give them a reason to be interested, and trying to communicate some best practices. Teaching programming to non-programmers is very problematic: trivial things are trivial, and everything else quickly requires expertise. I've investigate other paradigms, visual-programming (like https://xod.io/) having some advantages over text-based-programming (yet often abandoning the basic features of modern programming).

You may find my lecture notes/outline amusing.