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BrainPad STEM STEAM introduction
- 2. • Fun and evolving career • Higher pay • Global Need • Held by every race and gender Why STEAM Jobs?
- 3. • Ranges from hardware to software programming • Differ from web to mobile to IoT specialty • Possible remote work • Schooling is optional Why CS and Programming?
- 4. Our brain helps us in sensing the world Information flow, with our brain! See the Apple Draw the Apple
- 5. The inputs are the buttons and door sensor, the outputs are the display, the buzzer and the heating elements. Information flow, on an oven! Buttons Door Sensor Display Heating Element Buzzer
- 6. Information flow, on the BrainPad! INPUT >> PROCESS >> OUTPUT
- 7. Let the games begin!
- 9. Computers run very fast, you will not see any change The Light Bulb
- 10. Pause … let me see it!
- 11. Pull straight UP, not forward or sideways Using the BrainPad, Safely!
- 12. The Programming mode Press and Hold the Reset Button Green means Go!
- 13. Showing images on the Display
- 14. Click download and save the program into the BrainPad. Downloading into the BrainPad
- 15. Drag the unneeded blocks back to remove them. Remove what you do not need
- 16. Congratulations! You are now an expert!
- 17. Blocks vs JavaScript Peek under the hood
- 18. Note how we used the until done block. Playing Sounds
- 19. Mary had a little lamb…
- 20. … the hard way! Reading a button using if-statement
- 21. … the easy way. Reading a button using an event
- 22. This can also work in the simulator. Can you see the light?!
- 23. Fancy Graphs!
- 24. Decision making is very basic to processors Artificial Intelligence (AI)
- 25. Getting smarter!
- 26. It’s getting hot in here!
- 27. Turn the LED red when the temperature is above 74 degrees. Also, sound the alarm when temp is above 78 degrees. A challenge for you, the expert!
- 28. Variables are a way to remember something, in memory. Each variable has a unique name. Variables are Memory Units
- 29. Increment and decrement a variable using buttons Changing variables
- 30. What is the highest frequency you can hear? Check your ears!
- 31. What happened when you tap the table? An Earthquake Detector
- 33. Theft Detector
- 34. Connecting Motors to the BrainPad Two types of servo motors
- 35. Behold, the Servo Motor! Push the buttons to make the servo dance!
- 36. Use the map block to scale values easily. Show the temperature on a home-made gauge. Home-made Light Gauge
- 37. Home-made Temperature Gauge Show the temperature changes on a home-made gauge.
- 38. The Robo-dance!
- 39. With today’s activity, you now have enough knowledge to determine if programming is something you are interested in. You Tell Me… Program a Video Game? Make a Robot? Make a Mobile App? What is next?
Editor's Notes
- This presentation, combined with the BrainPad, provides an fun and easy introduction to computer science, for anyone age 10 and up. Having a BrainPad per student is not required but highly recommended.
- Our senses feed info into the brain, which in turn process all incoming information and determines what actions to take. You may see an apple and decide you want to draw it or want to eat it. The flow here is input process output.
- Even an oven, like any typical microwave oven, has inputs to feed in info and it has a processor to handle the info, and then it has outputs that the processor controls.
- The BrainPad works just like that. There are four inputs feeding information into the “brain”. The brain in this case is a tiny processor. This is just like the processor in your phone or computer, but much smaller.
- Enough with theories and let us have some fun. Go ahead and visit makecode.brainpad.com and from there click the New Project button. It si the one with the big plus sign.
- You now have the designer window. The simulator on the left, with block options in the middle and then your program goes on the right. We now see “On Start” and “Forever” loops. The first one will run only one time, when the BrainPad is powered up, or if you hit reset. The forever area runs … well, forever!
- We want to control the light bulb in this example. So, go ahead and from under Light Bulb, click and drag the set light bulb to block to under the forever loop. Select red for color and then do the same except set the color to blue. Observe the simulator. The light bulb will not work as expected, but why?
- Processors run very, very fast! The light bulb is in fact changing red to blue but it is happening very quickly for you to see it. This is like if you are holding flashcards and going through them quickly. I may not be able to see what is on the cards. We want to turn the bulb red, wait for a bit, then turn it blue and now wait one more time, then finally we can repeat the steps using the forever loop.
- Always pull the USB cable the same way you pushed it in. Pulling the cable sideways will rip the connector off the board and damage the BrainPad. The BrainPad is a raw circuit that might have rough edges. Observe caution when handling the board.
- Press and hold down the reset button till you see the Light Bulb turn green. This only takes a second and it is an indication that the BrainPad is ready to take a new program.
- If you already have the light bulb blinking project up, leave it as is. Or you can start a new project. Now, find the show image block and drag it to inside the on start. This is telling the BrainPad to show an image when it starts up. Go ahead and pick one of the images. Verify that the program does what it should do on the simulator. The on start and forever blocks are found under loops, in case you lost them.
- When you click download, the browser will show you the program file that you can download. Go ahead and save it into the BrainPad drive that shows whenever you put the BrainPad in programming mode, that is when you hold the reset button till the bulb turns green.
- Simply drag what you do not need back to remove them. The on start and forever blocks are found under loops, in case you lost them.
- Go ahead, change the image on the screen and the light bulb. Do not forget to test use the pause block as well. Break and Q&A.
- This course does not cover coding in JavaScript but it is always beneficial to peek at the code whenever you make changes to block. In the future, once you are comfortable, you can switch to using JavaScript.
- Add play sound block to the program. You may want to place it in the on start vs the forever loop. We also used until done so the BrainPad will not continue to the next block until the sounds is done playing. Otherwise you may have multiple sounds overriding each other. Select different sounds and try on the simulator and on the actual BrainPad. Try using two sounds back to back.
- Try playing different tones and make some beautiful melodies as you like.
- To read the button, we can repeatedly check if the button is pressed (do not use was pressed). We used the if statement to give the program some intelligence. And if we determined the button is pressed then the BrainPad would play a sound.
- The other option to read a button is using an event. Event basically a piece of program that runs whenever something (an event) happen. On this case, th even on button will fire whenever a button is changes. What button and what change is determined by the drop-down options.
- Yes you can see the light but let us see it how physics see it. Try this in the simulator and try to adjust the light level. Then try it on the BrainPad and try to cover the light sensor. Then shine a flashlight on it and observe the display.
- This is useful to see the light change graphed over time.
- We want to change the light bulb color depending on the status of the left button. Processors understand very small operations and we have to be very specific. Pressing the left button will turn the light bulb red but releasing the button will not do anything, simply because we didn’t tell it what to do! We have to specifically state what to do when the button is not pressed or use the else statement.
- It is possible to nest if statements, meaning put an if inside an if. But a better approach is to use operations like and and or. This works exactly how you read it. If the left button is pressed and the right button is pressed, then do something.
- Show the temperature on the screen and also give an indicator when the temperature is too hot. Testing this program on the simulator is easier since changing the room temperature won’t be quick! However, you can touch the temperature sensor and it will go up a couple of degrees in a few seconds.
- Run through this exercise by modifying the previous example. Time for a break and Q&A.
- If I say Gus is 12-years-old. You now have a variable in your brain called Gus’s Age! Anytime I refer to Gus’s Age, you know it is 12. I can now say that Greg is 2 years older than Gus and you will automatically know that Greg is 14-years-old. That is because you have accessed the variable in your memory, called Gus’s Age!
- When the left button is pressed down, we will change the variable called number but -100. Since this is a negative number, we are decrementing by 100. We then also increment the number when the right button is pressed.
- The older we get, the lower frequency we can hear. This exercise shows the frequency on the display and play it on the buzzer. Keep pushing the right button to raise the frequency until you can’t hear the buzzer from 10 inches away.
- One of the inputs on the BrainPad is called and accelerometer. It is used to measure acceleration. Any movement introduced to the BrainPad is translated into acceleration. This can be used to detect any shakes, like earthquakes, or you taping on the table.
- Change acceleration from strength to X and tilt the BrainPad while observing the value on the screen.
- By adding a siren sound that plays when acceleration is high, you can detect if someone is trying to take your BrainPad.
- The BrainPad is equipped with two servo motor ports. There are two kinds of servo motors, the ‘continuous servo’ and the ‘positional servo’. The continuous spins continuously, while the positional servos are set from 0 to 180 degrees.
- As mentioned, positional servo motors can be set to specific degree, 0 to 180. These blocks demonstrate that movement using buttons.
- Read the light level and then scale it to 0 to 180 degrees, then use the result to control the position of a servo motor. Let’s also show the light level on the screen. You can attach a straw to the servo motor to make a much larger and cooler guage. Can you modify the code to show the degrees on the screen as well?
- The other type of servos is full rotational. Those can be used to move a robot for example.