SPACE News

Arduino Workshops

At the beginning of November, in a series of workshops led by SPACE coordinator Joel Trudeau, students were introduced to the basics of the Arduino platform for STEAM projects. The active learning activities took place over two consecutive Friday afternoons with close to 90 students in total participating.

In the first workshop, Visual “programming” with Arduino: A gentle introduction to the world of making with Arduino, students were presented with an overview of Arduino and its possibilities, explored the basics, and then went on to design their own outputs of LED matrix displays.

The second workshop, Arduino for Robotics: Introduction to control with simple mobile robots, introduced students to Arduino for robotics. Through the use of virtual resources developed for engineering physics and physical hardware provided, the students were thrilled to discover that they could implement codes and move physical robots. Students completed an out take survey at the end of the workshops. They described the experience as “amazing” “enriching” and “fun”, many expressing the wish that there had been more time and indicating that they would like to work on an Arduino project for an independent project. Most wanted to participate in further Arduino workshops.

SPACE Writing Contest Workshop

A writing workshop will take place this Friday, November 18 from 2:30 to 3:45 p.m. in room 7A.6 for students interested in submitting a piece to the fifth annual SPACE Writing Contest. Students will receive tips on how to improve their submission, and how to relate their submissions to the arts and sciences as well as to this year’s WHAT IF? theme.

The annual SPACE Writing contest is open to students from every discipline across the College—the deadline to submit a piece is Sunday, December 18, 2022. Submissions can be in the form of prose (fiction or creative non-fiction), poetry, and essay.