Due at 10am on Monday, January 23

1. Read the syllabus

10 points

The syllabus captures lots of important information. Please read the whole thing from head to toe before our Monday class so that we’re all on the same page. A link to the syllabus PDF is here.

I’ll give a little oral quiz at the start of class Monday on some points addressed in the syllabus. I’m going to call on people at random. If I get the sense that people haven’t read it, we’ll need to use class time Monday to go over policy stuff, which I’d love not to have to do. So: please read all of it carefully.

2. Prepare to share a past project from this class

5 points

This is the eleventh semester that I’ve been teaching this class, so there are ten semesters’ worth of prior student work to check out to get a sense of the sorts of projects people have made.

Please take a look at some (or all, if you’re feeling motivated/bored) of the prior semesters’ student work, and find a particular Project 2: Assistive Device for Yourself or Final Project: Assistive Device for a Client that you’d like to share with the class. Find one that’s especially interesting, effective, surprising, intriguing, or for any reason you’re drawn to. (Not sure where to look for prior semesters’ pages? In the navigation column on the left ← click on “Previous Semesters.”)

In class on Monday, we’ll go around the room and you’ll have ~30 seconds to talk about that project and why you wanted to share it. Your job isn’t to advocate for it per se—just introduce it to the room and then we can briefly discuss it.

You don’t need to submit anything for this; just be prepared to identify your project of interest when I call on you on Monday.

3. Complete some asynchronous learning on the Arduino board, programming, and electronics

30 points

Please complete some asynchronous learning via Canvas modules, called “Arduino Board,” “Programming the Arduino,” and “Electronics.” In total, there are four videos in the “Arduino Board” section to watch, plus one optional one; there are five videos in the “Programming the Arduino” section; and there are six videos in the “Electronics” section I’d like you to watch for Monday. All of these together sum to about two hours fifteen minutes of lectures and there are interspersed activities and quizzes. Of course, feel free to speed them up or slow down the videos as you’re watching them.

The first series of lectures will talk about the physical Arduino board, and many of its features.

The second series of lectures will explain how to program the Arduino using C code, including a basic introduction to writing code, uploading it, and debugging it.

The third series of lectures cover some important elementary ideas behind electronics, including how we can draw schematics to represent circuits and some pencil-and-paper exercises for building up an intuition about electrical flow in a circuit. (Starting on Monday, we’ll learn how to put these ideas into action, but for now, it’s just going to be some stage-setting theory.)

As you’re watching, take notes and be sure to actually try to figure things out as I ask you to in the videos! If you just sit and watch as drool comes out of the corner of your mouth, odds are you’re not going to emerge from the video-watching sessions much wiser.

4. Post a question from the asynchronous videos

5 points

Please post at least one question to the Asynchronous homework questions forum on Canvas—and more than one question is fine, too. If you truly have no questions at all as you complete the asynchronous video sequence, then make a good question up—one you imagine a classmate might ask—and post that.