Last summer, I requested Art to acquire four of the kits linked below to make it easy for someone to teach Arduino classes and he did. This is a neat kit with ten sensors pre-wired. Noone has picked up on using these but I’m hoping they get used soon.
I could take a look at them and see if I can complete the projects on my own. I do have a little bit of experience using a raspberry pi and raspbian, so I could talk to Art sometime and see if the project is something I could do in the future.
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Electronics should have maybe half a dozen raspberry pis if I recall, and we should have a good handful of arduinos (and if not, I’ll donate a couple dozen).
If I remember correctly, while these can be used for classes, they cannot go home with people at the end of them- so they are fine for teaching programming, but not something for building an entire project around really.
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ELab has both Arduino Unos and Raspberry Pis.
Adam @excalbian was looking into creating Pi classes and may remember the model.
Going on recall here - enough Pis w/ enclosures of a given model to use the monitors and keybrds in the Pillar Rm. Will need to purchase mem cards.
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Yes - there are at least 6 working Raspberry Pi 3 (I’m pretty sure either the base 3 or the 3+ and not the newer variants). We also have enough memory cards (10-12?) to run all of them in a classroom setting.
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3D fab has a few they might can loan
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New section has filled up. Perhaps I need to add a third section in the future?
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So, an update. I’ll probably keep it to 2 sections for now, as the classes get longer and as the material gets more in-depth. I might do an additional section on a different day, but I’m not sure. I had some no-shows to both sections, so I might hold off a bit on that for now.
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So, I’m down to 2 students now (and we had a good time on Sunday). Had one no show on me, so I wasn’t eligible for honorarium. I can now see firsthand why a lot of DMS teachers quit after a while, since it stings to feel like your time is wasted.
Maybe we need to rethink the way that honorarium works? I get that the old system was abused, so we need restrictions, but the current implementation creates this adversarial system where teachers feel directly slighted by no-shows and cancellations, as if I get no shows / late cancellations, I feel like money is being directly taken away from me.
I don’t need the money (I mostly teach for member dues), but maybe another way would be to abstract the financial aspect a bit? Maybe waive membership and give out free merch instead of payments and rework the requirements? I believe that was the original intent of the system. And for the people that do need the income, we can do scholarships?
I’m not sure, these are just some ideas I’ve thrown, but I think the current system kills most desire I have to teach “niche” classes for underutilized spaces and as a teacher, I feel heavily penalized/burdened for no fault of my own. It seems like this system will not work if we want to expand the role of teaching and attract more teachers to fill out the calendar.
This is mostly just me venting my frustrations as a teacher, but I do think we need to address the issue at some point.
I’m aware that I can privately charge students for a class, but since I’m halfway in, this leaves me in an awkward position where I need to start charging for the rest of the material, teach for no honorarium for the next 3 months, or outright cancel the class, none of which are ideal.
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Multi-part classes are always a challenge. Serial classes are extra difficult as they require a serious commitment from the attendees, miss one class and you’re behind. Teaching programming, without even a Blinky LED has very little direct payoff for most people. This is why make and take classes are the gaining support. They are not serial, but the student gains additional knowledge each class. Maybe you can teach Python as part of an ESP32 class. Maybe show how a very simple vision project works. Or maybe how you can take snap shots from a camera board. They will have to slog through advanced topics, such as data structures and lists. They will learn things, but it will be interactive.
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Yeah, I’m planning on restructuring my course so that it - in theory - has standalone classes rather than being sequentially linked. Now that I’m getting to flow control, I can do simple projects, such as a calculator or a guessing game, and maybe moving onto tic-tac-toe or something.
I’ll probably leave modules and frameworks for after I finish the fundamentals and get some simple projects up.
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@simurghi - As we discussed, I think it is wonderful that you want to do an in-depth coverage of Python but that is hard to do at DMS.
After I read your note a couple replies up, I was thinking of how I could make a suggestion that could work in the DMS structure. You next reply really nailed it. If folks with minimal or no Python background can come in, learn about the language and jump into a fun program, it should be very successful. That is similar to the model I use for microcontroller classes. Based on experience in my classes, I would expect that there will be a number of people return for future classes on different subjects and learn even more about the programming language.
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It might be a bit difficult , since beginner TUI programs don’t have the wow factor that RGB LEDs on the arduino do. I was thinking of maybe rock paper scissors since tic TAC toe is a bit more advanced.
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I’ve put up a class on calendar and we’re going to make a simple rock-paper-scissors game.
I’m not going to get much into depth about loops, but I’ll make a basic boolean “while game running” for our purposes.
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I just grabbed the first seat! Looking forward to the class.
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Perfect. In case you need to use your own laptop, I’d recommend downloading Pycharm for your IDE. Using the stock Python interpreter with IDLE also works, since we’re not going to be doing anything too complicated.
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The first game I compiled is high/low guessing:
You made some good moves such as not defining it as a multi-part class. However, “Attendees require approval from the event host” may be keeping some from signing up.
It may be better to list the prerequisites for each individual class and let them decide whether to enroll or they can study before the class to get ready.
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The approval part is necessary since I’ve had too many no shows.
I’ll probably throw up a topic on talk later today to go over the essentials for the class so I can get more people to sign up.
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I do not understand.
Your latest class shows “9 spaces of 12 available” meaning that if nobody else registers, you have no, zip, zero, nada room for error in making the honorarium. By “punishing” those who may have no-showed you in the past, you may also be possibly punishing yourself by not letting them make it up to you this time.
At least you have set the limit high enough that potential no-shows do not block an earnest student who is late to register…
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If this is the issue… then change platforms and teach them how to program the ESP32 with microPython because it is the new sexy in this space. Note: I’m not sure of the best board, maybe one with an on board LED or screen. The expressif has nice support for the platform. I expect @artg_dms would at least consider supporting this idea since you have demonstrated a track record of following through with your classes.
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