CTEC - Building a Better Sensor Ball

Welcome to beautiful Canmore Alberta and the ATA CTS council's annual conference.

I hope that the session is entertaining and informative.

The Slides presentation can be found here.

Food for Thought - the Flopatron

November 10th - Introduction to Microcontrollers session.

Introduction to Microcontrollers

Hello and welcome to The Lab Under The Stairs, the Robotics/Pre Engineering space at Nelson Mandela High School.

Today we will be discussing micro controllers and microcomputers and how they can be of use in your classroom.

Bring your enthusiasm and I will take care of the rest.

- Mitchell Way

Teach the Teacher - August 9th and 29th 2017 Sessions

Presentations can be found:

• here (Grove) and 
• here (ARDX)

I hope everyone has a great time and learns something along the way.

Cheers.

Mitchell Way

Elastics and Electronics

from xkcd.com

Hello and welcome to Friday's session: Elastics and Electronics.

In this session we will be rigging up an infrared controlled whiffle ball shooter.

Let's have some fun.

Video - LEGO Weaponry

Welcome to CCTC 2017

from lulzbots.com

Hello and welcome to the wonderful world of Arduino. I'm Mitchell Way the CTS Learning Leader at Calgary's newest high school, Nelson Mandela.

Currently I'm teaching classes in Robotics/PreEngineering and Petrolium engineering. The Robotics course looks at robotics across Electrical Technologies (TMT - ELT) and Computer Sciences(BIT - CSE). The PreEngineering looks primarily at Civil engineering and the process of design (MDC - DES) including CAD, rapid prototyping and project analysis.

I am a huge fan of project based learning as well as providing an environment where failure leads to growth and where innovation follows every failure.

from Arduino.cc

I fight the black box effect wherever I see it which leads most of my projects to be fundamentally open source with visible circuitry in most cases.

What is an Arduino?

An Arduino is an open source microcontroller that has opened up all sorts of possibilities to those who thought electronics was a realm reserved for the tech-priests.

A microcontroller is a programmable microchip that can handle basic inputs and outputs of electricity. This means that electrical sensors can be read by an Arduino (we will be using a pushbutton) and small electronics can be powered by it (like LEDs).

Open source means that the schematics and source code for running Arduino are freely available...more on that later.

Enjoy the session and I hope that you fail and then learn something.

Mitchell Way