Collaborative Design and Creative Expression with Arduino Microcontrollers

Short Project

Students watch in class demo of their Arduino projects. (Image by H. Sharon Lin, MIT OpenCourseWare.)

Overview

Students form groups of two to four and work for six hours on a small project. We help facilitate this by discussing techniques for collaborative design, guiding the class in an improv activity, lead a brainstorming activity for the whole class to help students identify collaborators, allow students ample time to self-organize into teams. Students then have 6 hours of class time to develop an idea for a small interactive project with Arduino, to create the project, to discover if they like their teammates, and to learn about all the technical skills that will be needed on a team to succeed. Each group does a short presentation for the entire class and talks about their project, but most importantly talks about what they learned.

It may be helpful to keep a check on the groups and have them demonstrate their progress every occasionally and help them with debugging code or hardware. There may be times more often than once when groups do not seem to be making any progress with particular aspects of their project due to lack of knowledge in some technical domain or because the scope of the project is too ambitious. It could be helpful to help them redefine the scope of the project and to break it down into simpler modules that they can tackle one at a time and then integrate altogether.

The following project demonstrations are courtesy of the participants, including MIT students, and used with permission.

	Short Project 1: Arduino Pinball In this video, one of the student teams demonstrates their project, an Arduino Baseball game.
	Short Project 2: Back in Black Light Show One of the student teams presents their project, an Arduino based light and sound show, which is programmed using the Processing IDE. They use the sound library to sync the lights with music.
	Short Project 3: Calculator Students demonstrate their project, an Arduino based calculator that can do simple additions and displays the sum on a dial.
	Short Project 4: Chance Game In this video, one of the student teams demonstrates their projects, an Arduino based virtual ruler and a lottery game.
	Short Project 5: Infrared Lock In this video, one of the student teams demonstrates their project, an IR bike lock. The bike lock can be triggered using an infrared remote control.
	Short Project 6: Knock Knock Lock One of the student team presents their project, a sound activated safe lock.
	Short Project 7: Mario Light Show The LED array is pre-programmed to sync with music from the popular video game, “Super Mario.” This video is unavailable due to copyright restrictions.
	Short Project 8: Plant People Students present on their project, Plant People.