Gadgeteer and Calgary High School Students

First off like to thank Miran Nevesinjac for his help with these classes as having his help enabled us to give each student the guidance they needed to understand and complete the material for these labs as every student completed a fully working device and many of them were able to extend the functionality as well.

So these are pictures from the second of two sessions given to a local high school’s FIRST Robotics team as a way for them to get some personal hands on hardware and code experience. I taught this course to the same High School in the spring and they really enjoyed it and wanted to do it again this for their new team in the fall. Currently I’m trying to round up some hardware (DC Motors, Servos, Steppers etc) to teach them some hands on courses around motor control which would be directly applicable to their upcoming competition.

Sorry I forgot to get pictures from the first session as I tend to get wrapped up in the ‘teaching’ thing and forget to have someone take any pictures.

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@ Duke Nukem - Was @ Gary the guest photographer? :wink:

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@ devhammer - No but I think @ Gary has been dabbling in the website coding as the pictures were all orientated correctly here.

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I think that’s probably Windows being “smart”. I’ve noticed that Windows will turn pictures for display in Explorer despite their actual orientation in the file.

You know, that’s just one step closer to SkyNet… Elon Musk is right. We are making computers too smart.

[url]https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/rotate-image/[/url]

I managed to solve that image orientation problem.

@ Duke Nukem - I can’t believe this is a high school. Do American schools really have all this technology?

Duke is teaching that class to high school students at a Microsoft Store in Calgary, Canada.

But, yes, most schools in the U.S. (and probably Canada) have similar computer labs these days (minus the Gadgeteer gear).

you are fired!

you are lucky that I can’t fire you!

@ Gary - I solved your sideways photography problem Gary.

It’s not me, it’s the website :whistle: but I did give you like on the other post!

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@ Mr. John Smith - As mentioned I live in The Great White North also known as Canada, in the province of blued eyed Arabs and red necks, but after the great oil crash, its now the province of the unemployed, formally known as Alberta, but its also one of the most educated places on the planet ( Calgary where now engineers are now literally a dime a dozen ), so technology rules here and pretty much every high school has a FIRST Robotics team for example. Good news is I’ll be offering some new courses in different motor (DC Motors, Servos, Steppers etc) controls using Gadgeteer by the end of Christmas (guess what I’m doing over Christmas).

My computer lab in my first year of computer programming in high school (as a 13 year old freshman), had a huge desktop “monroe programmable calculator” that had no display, only paper tape. It did print text output in two colors (red and black) and it was programmed by scantron forms (filled out with #2 pencils)

This is it! The first computer I programmed.
http://www.oldcalculatormuseum.com/monroe1665.html

It was awesome. The next year we got a brand new TRS-80 level II, and actually had a (monochrome) screen with 128×48 resolution. What luxury.

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New year, new classes, so first up is ‘Gadgeteer and RoboticsPart 1 - Encoders & DC Motors’ and following that ‘Gadgeteer and RoboticsPart 2 - PID Controllers’ and then we will have classes on Servo and Stepper motors so these kids should be able to hit the ground running when it comes to making things move.

These classes will also be offered to the general public as well, so its going to be another busy year of sharing the Gadgeteer goodness.

@ Duke Nukem - Rule #1: never cover up the marketing goodies when taking the “money shot”. Looks like its going to be a great workshop!