Bootstrapping your Arduino Abilities class

Earlier this September, I held a class entitled “Bootstrappimg your Arduino Abilities.” The description blurb of the class reads:

Bootstraping your Arduino Abilities is intended to bring a relatively computer-literate person excited about Arduino and physical computing to someone who can do some basic things, but most importantly, has the confidence and a bit of the lingo required to help find out more information when they want to do awesome things with a microcontroller that they don’t know how to do.

It was aimed at people who are computer literate and can use the Internet, but don’t really know where to start with the whole Arduino thing.

The class fee included an Arduino, a USB cable, a mini breadboard, some LEDs, some resistors, some buttons, a potentiometer, and a piezo buzzer.

Over two nights, we went over basic input and output, what programming is and how to do it with the Arduino programming environment. We used a lot of online examples, to help the students practice the skills they’ll need when try try to follow online examples at home without experts nearby.

We ended with a nice long question and answer time. I’ve found that these are really needed in any Arduino class, as most everyone has a project in mind and wants to know the first step to realizing their vision.