After playing with it for a few days, I must say: IT IS AWESOME!
First, imagine an electronics kit that you get to assemble yourself. Yes, you GET TO. It's fun! The instructions and diagrams are extremely clear and easy to understand and written by someone who understands his audience. He knows that he's not writing for Berkeley engineers; he's writing for students and teachers that may or may not have experience with electronics and programming.
The kit uses Raspberry Pi as its "processing" backbone and a large set of components (a breadboard, lots of wires, LEDs, resistors, an accelerometer, an LED display, an HDMI cable, buttons, a speaker, and a really cool plastic case to house the whole thing.)
Then imagine small, easily digestible lessons that walk a student carefully through the process of designing circuits and then programming them with Python. The lessons are logical and incremental and FUN! Below is the circuit and the code used to test the LEDs on the Simon game.
Instead of just telling students, "Build this, and type in this code," the author walks the student through the process of outlining the code necessary to play the game (creating psuedo-code), assembling the button layout on the breadboard, coding and testing the buttons, assembling the LEDs, and then coding and testing the LEDs. He then walks the student through manageable, incremental steps of programming the game.
Simon is just one project of many that the author has created.
RaspberrySTEM is a great way to teach students how hardware and software interact and it will definitely bring out the inventor in elementary school, middle school, even high school students. I'm really excited to use this next year. I need to make sure that I thank our district's EdTech director for telling me about it!! It was exactly what I was looking for! Thanks, Brian!
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