Making Electronics and Programming Easy to Learn With Visual DIY Workbench

Have you ever wanted to inspire children to learn about electronics and microcontrollers? But the common problem we often face is that the basic knowledge of the field is quite hard for young children to comprehend.

There are a few circuit boards on the market that help young students to learn about programming like the BBC Micro:bit. But what I want to show is that we can make a lot of things with just one microcontroller and some electronic components and those things are pretty cool and fun to learn too. It also helps children to learn some basics about circuitry by letting them interact with connecting the wire between components and many things more.

Grade level: 5-9

Supplies

Arduino Uno x 1

LCD 16x2 x 1

Temperature & Humidity Sensor DHT21 x 1

Breadboard x 2

Battery holder x 1

Button x 4

LEDs

7-Segment LED & IC74HC595

Wires

Step 1: How to Do It?

It is extremely simple. All of the components I used in this project were bought a long time ago at a very cheap price.

All the process of building this project is in the video.

Step 2: How to Make Electronics More Exciting?

Now, it's time to make this subject more interesting.

For the first few lessons, students will learn about how electricity flows with some demonstration with the LEDs. They can also learn more about other components like resistor, capacitor,.. (just a brief description, we don't want to overstuff all the lessons). For safety reasons, all of the power wires are connected on the workbench.

When they get familiar with electronics in general, we can show them all the demonstration we can think of by using this board (a few of them are in the videos). This will help boost the interests of the student.

Then we can start teaching them about the GPIO and communication protocol like I2C. (Again, we just want to introduce this new concept.)

Next is about interrupt and how a program runs in a microcontroller.

Last but not least, we can teach them about sensors, how it works and their libraries.

Here is the demo code: https://github.com/dtnghia2206/TestBoard

Step 3: Conclusion

This project only aims to make electronics and programming feel more interesting to young children so that they can study this field as soon as they can. That's is why it has a lot of demonstrations. If they are interested in this field, they will start studying it from other sources (like the internet) as we all did. And that is the goal of this project.