Week 3 was all about electronics, and let me tell you, it was both challenging and exciting. Most of the students didn’t have much experience with electronics, so we had to start with the basics—voltage, current, circuits, and power. We went over things like the positive and negative sides of a battery, and how electrons move to create current. Even though this material can be more abstract and harder to teach, the students seemed really interested because they could see the immediate effect on the physical world around them.

We used Arduino kits for the hands-on part, and the kids loved it. They got to connect LEDs and make them blink, which for many of them was the first time they’d ever built something electrical from scratch. To take it a step further, we introduced Python to control the Arduino using a library called PyFirmata, which lets you write Python code to communicate with the microcontrollers. The idea was to show them how software can interact with hardware, but this is where we ran into some problems.

PyFirmata wasn’t always cooperating with certain sensors, especially when it came to reading voltage levels. There were a lot of moments where the code wasn’t working as expected, and I found myself troubleshooting more than teaching at times. On top of that, every day we had to disconnect and reconnect all the wiring, and I had to go around checking each student’s setup for bugs. While it was frustrating at times, it also forced me to slow down and teach troubleshooting as a skill, which is just as important as getting things to work the first time.

Despite these technical hiccups, we managed to teach them how to work with temperature sensors, showing the readings using LEDs, and we even printed data on an LCD screen. The students also got to use keypads for user input and learned about resistors, humidity sensors, and light sensors. It was rewarding to see them understand not just the code but how the physical components all come together to create a working system.

Even though it was a more complicated week, I’m proud of the progress they’ve made. They’re really starting to get the hang of how coding and electronics fit together, and their curiosity is growing. Next week, we’re diving into more engineering design, and I can’t wait to see what they’ll create. It’s been a lot of work, but it’s been so worth it to see their excitement and watch them build skills that will last them a lifetime.