Regardless of discipline, strong written communication skills are essential to a successful career. As graduate students, this is fact: completion of our degrees relies on the publication and presentation of our research. At GradHacker, we’ve offered a lot of advice on writing practices and strategies, from how to best overcome writer’s block to how to create effective deadlines.
For undergraduate students, though, the amount of communication training they receive depends on their majors—in STEM disciplines, communication skills are often a small part of the curriculum. Instructors instead usually ask students to solve problem sets in the form of assignments or timed exams. To better prepare our future scientists and engineers for the many reports and presentations they’ll have to do once they graduate, we can and should implement writing into our courses.
Each Tuesday is EducationTuesday here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts about educators and all things STEM. Adafruit supports our educators and loves to spread the good word about educational STEM innovations!
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.