This page documents the material that participants in the Polygon Door “Coding and Creative Machines” will learn. It can be used as a guide for learning, but also as a reference to return to when a new idea needs to be realised.
TUESDAY
Electricity and Circuits 101 : Some important things to know about electricity
LED Lights and Electricity
LED light basics. Controlling LED light with Arduino.
What is a Microcontroller?
A programmable chip that is not quite a full computer.
Lighting a LED with Arduino Power
LED light and Arduino power basics
Understanding Breadboards and Protoshields.
An easy way to connect up wires and try lots of different possibilities
Blinking LED on Arduino – The Arduino IDE
LED light basics. Controlling LED light with Arduino.
Ideation Dice
Expand the ideas that occur to you by throwing the Polygon Door ideation dice, and see what pops up!
Polygon Bugs – Abstraction and Grids.
Compute This! (Encoding & Instructions)
We translate our drawing bug to a set of instructions and use each other to explore both.WEDNESDAY
Drawing with Arduino and the OLED.
We introduce you to the Adafruit library for drawing on our tiny LCD screens and talk about abstraction.
Displaying a bitmap on OLED
How to display raster images on an OLED
Arduino Polygon Bug
Making things is all about Abstraction - here we start to learn what that means and how to get started.
Graphics Primitives for OLED screens
Variables
Reserving a box to hold a number (or text)
Increment (Teaching Computers to Count)
Increment just means to add numbers over and over to a total
Edge Conditions – If / else Statements
Computers and logic are full of edges! Its important to check for edges!
Animating our Polygon Bug
Lets give life to our Arduino Bug - Animation 101
Functions
Functions can help you keep you code clean!
Cleaning Up Code
Its no good if you can code - but can't read your code because its always such a mess. Cleaning up is important.
Pseudo Code – Come up with a plan for coding.
Pseudo Code is not quite code - its a plan for coding and way of thinking through plansTHURSDAY
Light Dependent Resistors
A photoresistor is a powerful analog sensor to get started with. Activate events with light, sense movement, and much more.
Piezo: produce bleeps
Play tones and beeps, make melodies!
Ultrasonic Sensors – How far is it?
Sensing Sound – Knock Sensor
How to use a piezo as a cheap movement, vibration and sound sensor able to provide a very rich set of valuesFRIDAY
