STEAMwhiz, Physical Computing, & Raspberry Pi’s, Oh My!!

STEAMwhiz

We are gearing up to reach more early education students across the good ol’ US of A in the latter half of 2022 (stay tuned). Our mission is to empower more students with the knowledge to become innovative problem solvers that will prepare them for their future, not our past. Our Co-founder and Program Director Allie and I have worked at all levels of the nation’s education system, from public school teachers to curriculum developers at National Laboratories to doing fundamental research at the highest levels of science in America to working at Fortune 100 companies! We are creating both in-person labs and digital courses (coming Fall/Winter 2022) to pass this knowledge on to the up and coming generations. This means that we are not developing one-off projects but a deep curriculum for students rooted in (S)cience (T)ech (E)ngineering (A)rt (M)ath to provide the fundamental and technical acumen to become the innovative problem solvers of tomorrow. You might ask why STEAM? Well, we believe that these fields have a bright future that will not only provide excellent careers for young students but allow them to be creative in amazing ways and exploits their natural curiosity about the world around them. By tapping into their potential, as early as 6 years old, we believe they will be able to find solutions to the novel and difficult problems they will face in the future!

Physical Computing

An amazing development in the last decade or so is the accessibility of Physical Computing for young students! What is physical computing and why is it important? Well we know computing is related to computers right 😋 let’s give it a bit more of a formal definition

COMPUTING is any goal-oriented activity requiring, benefiting from, or creating computing machinery.

Wikipeda

In other words, it’s the use of a computer to accomplish some goal or task. This typically resides inside of the computer in the virtual world. Some examples are creating a scientific model to predict the weather or writing a blog post like this one 😄

Now we add the word PHYSICAL to the term COMPUTING and we move out of the virtual-only world and interact with the physical ‘real’ world as well.

PHYSICAL COMPUTING involves interactive systems that can sense and respond to the world around them.

Wikipedia

Sometimes it’s easier to see than to read, so below are some fun examples from MIT Maker Resources for K-12 Educators.

This is basically at the heart of all our technology; bridging the human physical world with the virtual technological one! Now imagine the amazing creativity and ingenuity that the next generation of students can explore with these tools at their disposal, if we transform the when, what, and how we teach them!

Raspberry Pi’s

Ok, so how does the Raspberry Pi fit into all of this? The Raspberry Pi is an amazingly powerful, little single-board computer that is relatively inexpensive for students to explore Physical Computing. What makes it different than any other computer? While it is a ‘normal’ computer that can be used to browse the internet, write a document, and code a program, it also has an amazing suite of programs geared for kids to explore computing! Moreover, it has special PINs called General Purpose Input Output PINs (aka GPIO PINs) that allow the Raspberry Pi to connect to sensors, lights, motors, actuators, buzzers, pumps, and so much more. It bridges the physical world into the virtual one like the videos above!

One challenge of the Raspberry Pi is that there is a barrier to entry that requires a certain level of technical understanding to really unlock its power. So what we have done at STEAMwhiz is create a wonderful plug and play solution for parents and students, which we call the STEAMwhiz Pi 😅

The STEAMwhiz Pi (pictured above) is basically an exact clone of what we use in our in-person labs, with a touch screen and the exact software configuration we use to teach our students throughout the academic year! This allows for our students to continue working & innovating at home well after they leave the lab. Bonus they can use it for their school work too, as it’s a full-blown desktop computer!

Where is this all going? Well, while there are great tutorials online and fun project boxes, most are not really targeting early education & holistic curriculum development. So it is possible for some very driven students to learn, but it’s mostly geared toward an older audience through standalone disconnected projects. In Q3 & Q4 of 2022, we will begin the rollout of our STEAMwhiz app to deliver STEAM courses specifically targeting early education which will be a full-blown curriculum to provide our decades of experience to students across the country in a fun animated storybook fashion. The STEAMwhiz Pi is the first step so parents can just plug and play a system for their children to begin exploring the world of physical computing! You can learn more about the STEAMwhiz Pi here.

Getting Started in Physical Computing

In the meantime, while we roll out our STEAMwhiz app, we encourage our students and parents to check out the links below to get started in the world of physical computing and get those inquisitive minds working! Feel free to reach out if you have questions or comments and we will be happy to engage.

Python & Physical Computing

This tutorial introduces some basic electronic components and how to use a great coding language called Python to control LEDS, buzzers, and more! Python is ubiquitous in research and industry throughout the world and is an excellent first coding language to start out with.

Scratch & Physical Computing

The tutorial above introduces physical computing using a drag and drop visual block coding language known as Scratch. If you are unfamiliar you can read more about it in our other post here. We recommend this for students who can read and write but are just starting to dip their toes into coding.

Once you have gone through the tutorials above you can check out more here fun projects from the Raspberry Pi Foundation.