Arduino Workshops at Greenway Primary.

We spent the day with years 5 and 6 of Greenway Primary School providing workshops looking into the Arduino technologies we will be using on our music installation. This was something very different for the children, however, they took to it like a fish to water and were soon asking lots of questions about the technology.

We started by asking them to connect the Arduino boards to the computer and launching the programming environment software. To introduce them to the Arduino environment we started by loading some simple LED blinking sketches where they changed the timings of the blinks by altering some numbers. This was literally child’s play for them, so we swiftly moved on to connecting various tactile controllers and environment sensors. The children learned what inputs and outputs are, and then on to integers and variables. They changed variables to alter pitch and duration and used integers to work out musical scales.

We had so much fun today that we didn’t have much time to take photos. However, we did manage to make a short video showing some of the things we learned: