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

Thursday Morning Funny - Comeback

Grove Kit Unpack and Play - February 10th Session

Welcome to Nelson Mandela

Today we will be looking at some of the pedagogy around the Grove Educational Kit and some of the connections between CTF and CTS.

We will also be working with a simple maker project.