ShrimpingIT After-school Maker Club

St Leonard’s CE Primary School in Walton-le-Dale,Preston, Lancs has become the first (AFAIK :) ) primary to run an after-school ShrimpingIt Maker Club.

Having seen and talked to Mr ShrimpingIt (Cefn Hoile) at several events over the summer, I spent a very enjoyable evening up in Morecambe learning how to put a Shrimp together.

Armed with 10 Shrimp Kits, I now have 10 pupils in out Maker Club where they spent the 1st session being very excited but managed to install the Arduino IDE on 10 of the school laptops, have a look at a built shrimp and a full Ardunio Duo and watch me blink an LED!.

We talked about building a Simon Game, LED Dice, a spinning dice and the favourite was a bedroom alarm to keep out nosy siblings and parents!

Next time we will be actually building a Shrimp on a breadboard and getting them to flash LEDs!

Week2

So, we got to build our first Shrimps 🙂  I pre-installed the ATMega328s onto the board (had to install the bootloader on them the night before) and the pupils inserted the 2x22pf capactitors, then the crystal, the 10K resistor and the 100nf reset capacitor and bridged across the top of the chip with an LED between pins 19 (Arduino Pin13) and pin 8 (0V).  The pupils wanted me the check their wiring but I tried as much as possible for them to use each other.  Some did struggle with inserting the components in the right holes and it was apparent that what we need is a construction booklet for each person with clear diagrams and simple steps with the booklet also up on the whiteboard display.

We just had time for 2 club members to upload the blink sketch and flash their LEDs (make sure all chips are blank in future – some already had blink loaded!) and they changed the blink pattern to show that they were the ones instructing the Shrimps – they pulled the TxD/RxD/DTR cables off to show that the Shrimp was running the program by itself.  I just used coloured breadboard jumpers to connect the USB programmers to the breadboards as I hadn’t prepared short coloured wire leads.  I think for future sessions, some sort of pre-wired loom that just plugs straight into the breadboard would be a good idea.

Roll on Week 3 🙂

Week3

Only 2 out of the 10 Shrimps actually worked straight away – got another 3 working by end of club (only had 50 mins due to normal school over-running) and move onto actually determining what project they wanted to build (and therefore what bits I need to get over half-term) – they were interested in a POV project (5 people) but then 9 of them voted to build a bedroom “burglar” alarm.

Things learnt – between week 2 and week 3 – test and fix all breadboards – also definitely need to color code major rows on he board (such as pin1, pin7,pin8 and the DTR connection) and make sure using the rainbow coloured cables (green/yellow/orange/red/brown) for the programmer connection as 2 different colour schemes was too confusing.

So half-term – time to get some bits – maybe need 2nd breadboard for extra space for projects – also some 3xAA battery boxes for POV projects.
Week4
Good things – I ordered the PIR sensors, got plenty of LEDs, got 10 extra breadboards to give more space, tried and tested (and fixed) all 10 Shrimps 🙂
But…the PIR sensors didn’t arrive in time (China sourcing is cheap but slow 🙁 ), decided to get club members to install S4A (Scratch 4 Arduino) on the laptops and upload the S4AFirmware to their shrimps – that took lot longer than it should/expected so we just ended up with 15 mins of actually programming our Shrimps but they all liked using a Scratch type interface and they switched their LEDs off and on and connected a switch to an input and saw that the S4A monitor changed value (they did query the words true/false).
As I only had one PIR sensor, we plugged that one in instead of the switch and we had a bit of fun in seeing if anyone could get near the Shrimp without setting it off.
Hopefully – next week, they will all be able to code up a simple alarm using S4A and maybe we can get around to the principle of an entry/exit delay

You may also like...

3 Responses

  1. John F says:

    Hi Simon, You are doing a great job both with the kids & over speed issues with Scratch and helping us use GPIO etc. I for one am following your postings here & elsewhere & learning a lot. I spent enough years as a teacher in a school with a head who thought the world began & ended with history & artistic-type culture- you seem lucky to have a supportive environment. Go, show ’em!

  2. cymplecy says:

    Thanks for the nice comments

    Week 2 Shrimping Maker Club update posted

  1. 8th November 2012

    […] ← ShrimpingIT After-school Maker Club […]

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *