Jamie Alexandre, a grad student at UC San Diego, was interning at Khan Academy last summer when he got the idea to build a version of the site that could be used offline or in places with only limited connectivity. Khan Academy videos and exercises are Creative Commons licensed, so sharing is A-OK; KA Lite is independent of Khan Academy, although they are friendly.
KA Lite is written in Python and can be run using almost any computer, including outdated, donated machines, or an open-source, $25 Raspberry Pi. “What we’ve built is a ‘web server’ that runs on lightweight hardware and interacts with videos and stores progress with users and creates user logins,” says Ben Cipollini, another UCSD grad student who is part of the KA Lite volunteer team. “You can reimplement the Khan Academy website with those pluggable parts onto a web server that can be used almost anywhere.”
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, or even use Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for MakeCode, CircuitPython, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell with Google Hangouts On-Air is every Wednesday at 7:30pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
