As you all know I teach a Gadgeteer Hands On Lab every Wednesday night at the local Microsoft Store and one again it was a full house of folks wanting to try Gadgeteer and given next Wednesday’s class is also fully booked Microsoft is setting up the registration etc for a round of classes all through April.
What makes this fun is when you see people’s imaginations open up as to what is possible now with Gadgeteer. Everyone has devices they have wanted to build but couldn’t before, but now with Gadgeteer they see they can. What is even more fun for example in this class we had an SCADA engineer who works with arduino and after trying Gadgeteer and building and coding his first Gadgeteer device with it in the space of 30 minutes, he’s just going WOW!! How Gadgeteer is laid out makes sense to him and he is already going off and thinking about how much easier it would be to design and build other devices with Gadgeteer.
Everyone that has taken this class has asked for more, so hopefully I’ll be able to do IoT and Robotics classes using Gadgeteer with Azure, which should be even more fun.
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@ Duke Nukem - Are you doing the same class several times, or is this a progression of classes with the same (or roughly the same) group? Sounds like the former, but I wanted to be sure. Great to hear the interest in Gadgeteer!
Its the same class every week.
What is the best way to upload a PDF of my slide deck for this course?
@ Duke Nukem - Upload to where?
If I was doing it, I’d save the PPT as PDF, then upload it to OneDrive.
Then you can either share a link (I always shorten links before sharing), or embed it, depending on where you want to share.
Have you heard of office mix 
http://mix.office.com the best way to share ppts with the world, works even on Mobiles and you can even add quizzes
check it out… and yes it is FREE and yes it does include analytics as to how many views and all that crazy data that some people find useful :whistle:
Jay.
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@ Jay Jay - Thanks as that’s a keeper link, as that looks slick so I’m going to give that a go.
That is cool and looking at the pictures, it’s not all just young people wanting to learn. 
I did notice a lack of females though, so was wondering if any at all had attended any of the meetings or has this just been all men?
My daughter told me the other day that her cousin (also female) and her want to do the same type of work I do. I think when she saw the tracked robot I am building working for the first time and the fact making small changes to the code made it do something else she got interested. Up until now she was not sure what she wanted to do and now she even wants to learn English even more (she is Indonesian) so that she can get into tech. 
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That’s great!
How are you publicizing these? Is it just through something in the store?
Pete
This makes me think there could be potential for Gadgeteer in retail. Maybe a small section with modules and boards. I think the software would need to be simplified. Maybe the gadgeteer graphical designer UI and a simple IDE similar to small basic. The retail space could have maybe three simple live working projects to show what can be done.
Just a thought.
Gadgeteer is a hit wherever you go. I just got back from the NoVA Mini Maker Faire in Reston, VA, where I had a booth showing off Gadgeteer. More here:
https://www.ghielectronics.com/community/forum/topic?id=18692
Fun stuff…great to see how excited people get when you show them what they can do…
Ive tried talking to my tech-y friends about the c# cerbuino before, and they all rejected it spouting shit like
compiled master race
c# isn’t Real-time cuz interpreted
lower level is faster
You should have seen how pissed they were once I learnt ghi had rlp, one reason I chose ghi over netduino. but then
4KB rlp is too small
Im glad you are having better luck
@ Pete Brown - The first 3 events were all through the local Calgary .Net User Group which I help run and present at, but based on the demand etc for these labs, I’ve opened them up to the general public and so the Microsoft Store is handling the registrations etc for the events in April.
April 1st Microsoft Store & billing help
April 8th Microsoft Store & billing help
April 15th Microsoft Store & billing help
I’ll likely take a trip up to Edmonton one weekend in May and do some of these classes at the Microsoft Store in the West Edmonton Mall, but I suspect that demand in Calgary is just going to continue so I’ll likely be spending my Wednesday nights in May teaching this lab as well, got to spread the Gadgeteer goodness.
Summer could get interesting as it could be Gadgeteer Labs on the Lake in British Columbia.
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@ Duke Nukem -
Who know that North Denver would be a hotbed for Gadgeteer 
