44 — Marcus has given birth to some great projects!
2015-11-01. By Kelly.
Fig. 1. Marcus being dismantled.
Patrick is busy taking apart Marcus. Our second family robot. At first Patrick thought that I should bring Marcus to school and then have the students tear it apart. However, Marcus is not a sleek new machine. Marcus was run by Pics and a basic stamp. We wanted to have the students move onto Ardurino or ATmega358 platform.
So far Patrick has come up with three projects for the students to experiment with in our Smith MakerSpace. One part of Marcus will make an IR Sensor project. The IR is set up on a copper board so that a student can observe voltage changes when the IR sensor is being used to detect objects. The other LED Resistor project is a set of 4 LEDs on a small copper board. This will be a great tool for students to use to understand how LEDs work and hopefully teach students about the importance of resistors. It is important to give students projects that will allow them opportunities "to let the smoke out" and problem solve solutions. The LED project will be one of those. Another project for the future is a POT project. This is a set of POTs that are mounted on a copper board. It will give my future engineer and multimeter specialist something to experiment with.
One thing I have discovered working with students in the MakerSpace, is that it is difficult to anticipate the interest of your students. These three projects will be used with my students this week because the students have just requested to use LEDs and resistors. One student in particular is fascinated by voltage and the voltage needed to run devices. I want him to have a variety of equipment to test and I will be raiding our solar panel supply so he can compare the voltages generated by different solar panels.
Fig. 2. Pat figuring out what to do with Marcus parts for the Maker space.