Kits and projects for Educators #BackToSchool Guide

Adafruit backtoschool 2018 blog

Adafruit has a ton of great resources for educators to help them out in the classroom. From kits to learn guides, Adafruit has you covered.

Today for Back to School Month we lay out some packs for Teachers!

Check out these Kits and Projects that make excellent tools for the classroom:


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Code.org Circuit Playground Express Educators’ Pack For many years, instructors and teachers have asked us to come up with a better way to teach programming and electronics. We have worked on Circuit Playground Express for over a year to come up with a board that is powerful, beautiful, fun, and perfect for teaching Code.org CS Discoveries

Circuit Playground Express is a perfect introduction to electronics and programming. It combines a poweful ATSAMD21G18 microcontroller with full Code.org CS Discoveries, MakeCode, CircuitPython and Arduino support. You can program it in any of those language and it even comes with a collection of useful sensors, inputs and outputs all built-in! The board is round and has alligator-clip pads around it so you don’t have to solder or sew to make it work. You can power it from USB like your computer. To make it portable, a AAA battery pack, or with a Lipoly battery (for advanced users) can be plugged in. Circuit Playground Express has built-in USB support. Built in USB means you plug it in to program it and it just shows up, no special cable or adapter required. Just program your code into the board then take it on the go! (Learn more!)


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Code.org Circuit Playground Individual Kit Pack – The Code.org CS Discoveries course is a yearlong curriculum for teaching computer science, and there’s even a physical computing unit! For large classrooms and workshops, we recommend our Code.org Classroom pack. But, if you need to supplement your Classroom pack or are learning on your own, we now have a mini-kit – with just the essentials for a single student or share-pair. (Learn more!)


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Adafruit MetroX Classic Kit – Experimentation Kit for Metro 328 – Interested in making neat stuff with an Arduino-compatible board but not sure where to start? This kit includes all the pieces needed to complete over 20 different circuit and projects. Basically everything you need to be playing within minutes of its arrival. No soldering required, works with Mac, Windows and Linux!

This item is the same exact kit as https://www.adafruit.com/product/170

This pack includes the Adafruit Metro. METRO is the culmination of years of playing with AVRs: we wanted to make a development board that is easy to use and is hacker friendly. At the heart is an ATmega328P, with 32KB of flash and 2KB of RAM, running at 16 MHz. It is fully compatible with the Arduino IDE (select “Arduino UNO” in the board-type menu) (Learn more!)


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Adafruit Metro 328 Starter Pack – Heard about Arduino IDE-compatibles but not sure how to start? The Adafruit Metro is an ATmega328-based (like a lot of our own products) development board. Since it is shaped the same, and code/shield-compatible with the Arduino UNO R3 design, our Adafruit Metro is easy to use and hacker friendly and this is the perfect beginner kit for learning how to use the Adafruit Metro!

This bundle is designed to get you started quickly and easily on your path of learning electronics. Once you’ve received your starter pack you can follow the introductory tutorials here on my site, designed for everyone, even people with little or no electronics and programming experience. The starter pack has everything you need (except tools) for most of the lessons. (Learn more!)


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E-Textiles Student Kit – This kit is designed for use with the electronic textiles unit in the Exploring Computer Science (ECS, exploringcs.org) introductory computing curriculum for secondary students. It contains most of the materials needed for four e-textiles projects: paper circuit, wristband, mural, and human sensor project. The curricular unit is designed to take students new to computing and sewing through a series of projects where they learn simple, parallel and computational circuitry; sequencing, conditional logic, sensor reading, functions, and related programming in Arduino; three-dimensional crafting and design; and computational thinking practices such as debugging, iteration, revision, problem solving, and algorithmic thinking. The curriculum will be publicly released in Fall 2018 on the ECS site. (Learn more!)


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E-Textiles Class Kit – This kit is designed for use with the electronic textiles unit in the Exploring Computer Science (ECS, exploringcs.org) introductory computing curriculum for secondary students. It contains most of the materials needed for four e-textiles projects: paper circuit, wristband, mural, and human sensor project. The curricular unit is designed to take students new to computing and sewing through a series of projects where they learn simple, parallel and computational circuitry; sequencing, conditional logic, sensor reading, functions, and related programming in Arduino; three-dimensional crafting and design; and computational thinking practices such as debugging, iteration, revision, problem solving, and algorithmic thinking. The curriculum will be publicly released in Fall 2018 on the ECS site.


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Microsoft Azure IoT Starter Kit w/ Adafruit Feather HUZZAH – In collaboration with Microsoft, Adafruit’s releasing IoT Starter Kits with boards, sensors, and components that are ‘Azure Certified for IoT.’

Azure is Microsoft’s cloud solution for IoT projects that’s a comprehensive and flexible program from the Microsoft team that they’re extending into the open source hardware world. This starter kit includes a pre-soldered Adafruit Feather HUZZAH with ESP8266 WiFi and some sensors and components to get you started on your IoT journey.

Feather is a development board from Adafruit that, like its namesake, is thin, light and lets you fly. We designed Feather to be a new standard for portable microcontroller cores. (Learn More!)


adafruit_BackToSchool_logo

August is Back to School Month here at Adafruit! Each week we’ll be bringing you a two #BackToSchool posts on the blog! Stay tuned for product and gift guides, tutorials from the Adafruit Learning System, and inspiration from around the web! Get started by checking out Adafruit’s educational resources, such as our kits and project packs, suggested products for young engineers, blog posts for educators and an extensive selection of books to help you learn!







Adafruit publishes a wide range of writing and video content, including interviews and reporting on the maker market and the wider technology world. Our standards page is intended as a guide to best practices that Adafruit uses, as well as an outline of the ethical standards Adafruit aspires to. While Adafruit is not an independent journalistic institution, Adafruit strives to be a fair, informative, and positive voice within the community – check it out here: adafruit.com/editorialstandards

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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, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, 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 is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.

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CircuitPython – The easiest way to program microcontrollers – CircuitPython.org


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