Learning Linux with this retired single-board computer
For today's Snowday Learning Lab research meeting, we got to play around with some old bits and pieces in the lab. After finding a blank miniSD card, we got this pcDuino 3 up and running. Always fun to get creative with adapters!
Without too much fuss, we were able to program some simple Scratch commands. However, this dinosaur was originally designed to interface with Scratch 1.0 (see an archived image from MIT's Scratch Lab below). We had no problems connecting the device, but we did have a few glitches syncing the code. It helped me realize how quickly these little tech tools change over the course of a few years - all the more reason to get down into the fundamentals, so that transitioning from 1.0 to 2.0 to 3.0 isn't too tricky in the future. This was also a great opportunity to practice coding Linux. Working with ubuntu allowed us to get started coding, and with more time, we'll be able to code the pcDuino just like a regular Arduino board.
This picture, and more info, can be found at Sparkfun's retired tutorial.
Next week, I'll be presenting some work on training educators to foster "Makerspace mentalities" in students. How can we build teachers' capacity to design more open-ended challenges for their students? What types of training do educators need to encourage iterative design thinking in the classroom? We'll be discussing Koh & Abbas (2015), an article from the Journal of Education for Library and Information Science, as a frame of reference. Having faced a few challenges today with the lil duino makes some of the references to constant learning and problem solving capabilities particularly relevant!
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