This series of programming and prototyping activities provides students an introduction to programming in the Arduino IDE and creating circuits using basic electrical components. The activities are modified versions of the ones found in the Vilros Ultimate Starter Kit Guide (not included, see link below). I designed these activities as instructions provided with the Vilros kit showed students how to build/program circuits, but did not provide students any opportunities to solve programming/prototyping problems. These lessons could be modified to work without the Vilros kit using an Arduino board and basic electrical components (servo, dc motor, LED, tri-color LED resistors, potentiometer, push button, piezo buzzer, bread board) or with the online Arduino simulator found on TinkerCAD (link below).

For each circuit, students are asked to first create the circuit shown in the Vilros book and run the provided code. After running the program successfully, students are asked to create two modified programs to perform a given task. When students successfully run each program, they are instructed to have their teacher sign in a provided table. The following is an example of one of the problems:

Modified Circuit Program 1 - Modify the program to perform the following looping action: Turn the LED on at HIGH power for .5 seconds. Turn the LED off and delay at the value of the potentiometer.

Modified Circuit Program 2 - Modify the program to perform the following looping action: Use an If Statement to make the LED turn off if the potentiometer provides a sensor value ranging from 0 to 511 and to turn on if potentiometer provides a sensor value ranging from 512 to 1023.

This lesson includes activities covering 8 circuits with a total of 16 modified circuit problems.

Arduino Uno 3 Ultimate Starter Kit

TinkerCAD