Hawaiian Technology Inventors Club, Arduino and Beyond

Here are projects that my students have been working on lately in the club. We began the year working with electronic circuits and then experimented with the Arduino microcontroller to create circuits to blink lights. Students create a circuit to light up a diode and write the program to control the frequency of blinks and intensity of brightness. Then they upload it to the board which controls the circuit. Students are programming in C using the Sketch IDE. Now they are building robots using CDs, Velcro, and hot glue. First they help each other build the frame; then they connect the Arduino board to the servos and power source. A program is uploaded to the board for programmed operation. Students experiment with ways to modify the program to have the robot move in different directions. They are truly engineers creating a robot from scratch, actually modifying the internals of their creation, wires, sensors and all. Future goals are to build a sensor to turn the robot, add another sensor to follow a line, add a sweeping arm, and experiment with other materials to build the same robot. Since the Arduino board is not permanently mounted on any one project we can use the board for countless other tasks.