Lonnie Johnson – Inventor – African American History Month 2015 #BlackHistoryMonth
Dr. Lonnie Johnson, inventor and more – first African American man in history inducted into the Alabama Engineering Hall of Fame.
Lonnie George Johnson is an American inventor and engineer who holds more than 80 patents. Johnson is most known for inventing the Super Soaker water gun, which has ranked among the world’s top 20 best-selling toys every year since its release. Johnson attended an all-black high school “Little B. High School”. He earned a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering and a M.S. in Nuclear Engineering from Tuskegee University (The campus of Tuskegee University was designed by architect Robert R. Taylor, the first African American to graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.). After college, Johnson joined the U.S. Air Force, where he helped develop the stealth bomber program. Later, he worked at NASA on Galileo’s mission to Jupiter. More recently, he teamed up with scientists from Tulane University and Tuskegee University to develop a method of transforming heat into electricity with the goal of making green energy more affordable – Wikipedia.
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.
