Projects for Students from the Adafruit Learning System #BackToSchool Guide

Adafruit backtoschool 2018 blog

Adafruit has a bunch of great resources for students to help make heading back to school a little less daunting and a little more exciting. Today for Back to School Month we’ve put together some of our favorite student-friendly projects from the Adafruit Learning System – check ’em out below!


Hello World of Robotics with Crickit: Starting out in robotics, get up and running in a single setting with Adafruit Crickit and Circuit Playground Express

Robotics has been tough to get into. Be it initial planning, software requirements, expensive hardware, and endless integration. We’ve been there, even poor Ladyada and her MIT robotics class back in the day.

Today, robotics does not have to take extensive planning, arcane software, expensive hardware or anything else! Seriously! How is this so?

Today’s modern innovations have all come together to bring robotics to the level that anyone can do sitting down in one session. Be that at your kitchen table, workbench, or in a classroom. In any of these settings, with some simple parts and any common computer, you can easily accomplish what is presented in this guide. Learn more.


Make It a Mouse: Turn your Circuit Playground Express into a computer mouse

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There are a lot of things one can do if they are able to interface their electronics to their desktop / laptop computer. It’s easier than ever to make these connections, especially with Circuit Playground Express.

The USB specification has several ways to characterize devices. This includes telling the computer that the device you are plugging into the USB port is a keyboard or mouse. These peripherals are categorized as human interface devices (HID). Learn more.


Zombie Tag Game with Circuit Playground Express: Play infrared zombie tag with Circuit Playground Express and CircuitPython or MakeCode!

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You’re a human! Right? For now anyway… There’s a red pulsing in the distance… OH NO! IT’S A ZOMBIE! You’re losing health, but what’s this? A white pulsing from around a corner, a healer! You’ll stay human for a little longer… Hopefully long enough to check out this guide!

Using Circuit Playground Express you can make a game that’s half laser-tag half hide-and-seek. Learn more.


Cardboard Fundamentals: Learn to build mechanisms, structures, and more with cardboard!

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Cardboard is awesome. This ubiquitous material is inexpensive (or free if you keep your old shipping boxes), sturdy, and easy to work with. It can be much faster to build with than wood, metal, or plastic, and the tools needed are a lot cheaper!

In this guide, we’ll show you the fundamental techniques and tools you’ll need in order to start building cardboard structures, mechanisms, and robots! Learn more.


Using Cutting Machines for Projects: Make Blinka, Minerva, Crickit and Adabot!

This guide will cover how to use cutting machines to create paper art of the Adafruit Circuit Playground characters. We’ll also cover topics on how to design artwork for paper crafting projects. We’ll go over materials, tools and workflows for creating fun projects. Learn more.


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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!


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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.

Join us every Wednesday night at 8pm ET for Ask an Engineer!

Join over 36,000+ makers on Adafruit’s Discord channels and be part of the community! http://adafru.it/discord

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