Awesome Shield Attaches to Arduino, Teaches Kids to Code
The team at Awesome Shield started with a central goal – everyone should know how to program, and everyone should know how to program hardware. Awesome Shield is in the final days of a highly successful Kickstarter campaign to fund their hands-on Arduino powered coding project.
The project brings together video tutorials, simple coding exercises, and hardware to make projects. The guts of the Awesome Shield project is the shield that fits over an Arduino board, and can then attach to components to build different devices and teach programming and invention.
Two ports, an LED, a knob, a toggle switch, a button, a buzzer, a light sensor and wire ports are all included on the shield itself. An LED screen, IR sensor, microphone, gyroscope, servo motor, sonar sensor, touch sensor, magnet and moisture sensor can all be purchased from Seeed Studios and added to the shield.
Awesome Shield has tested its desktop based programming app over the last two years with more than 400 users. The code library is designed to be simple so anyone can use it, and the hardware design and code library are both open source and available on GitHub. The team has also committed to building a large Gadget Gallery where users can post their projects and code so others can view and duplicate their projects. A shoebox burglar alarm, light-sensor theremin, and programmable candle are all project examples on the Kickstarter page.
This is a great project dedicated to developing future generations of programmers, engineers and inventors. A hardware platform that allows young makers to start slow and then customize their way up to larger projects is a great tool for new users and experienced veterans alike. The first wave of Awesome Shields are expected to ship in December 2016.