I bought this kit from Marc Cryan through his Kickstarter project. It is the perfect size project to introduce young kids (and even adults) to all or one of basic electronics, soldering, and programming. My 11 year old daughter was curious but didn't know what to expect. She quickly got the hang of soldering after about 5 minutes (I've done a lot of soldering but I'm no expert either). She was very pleased to have accomplished that and have a working Blinky Fish in about 30 minutes. Since Mark provided a starter program you can run on your Arduino so you can see results immediately. That was two weeks ago. We haven't yet done the programming part of the project. This is where she can experiment with her own ideas for making it interactive. The nice part of that (I hope) is she can keep it simple and see results. Then when she's more confident she can make something very complicated. Yes, you can make interesting behavior and learn a lot with three lights and one button. I have complicated state machine ideas we could play with later but I don't want to spoil the self driven exploration part of it for her so I'll keep quiet for now.
Consider getting the "FishBowl" that is also for sale. I bought that too. It is optional but it will let you run your Blinky Fish plugged only into the battery powered FishBowl which is much smaller and more portable than your Arduino board that is probably plugged into your computer.
One final note about assembly. You almost can't go wrong except if you are not familiar with LEDs. They are not symmetrical like resistors and switches. Be sure to follow carefully the instruction Marc provides which show the orientation in the picture one LED leg is intentionally longer than the other. Maybe a better text explanation could have been provided in that step.
Have fun.
No comments:
Post a Comment