Besides the paragraph in your middle school textbook that mentioned the Statue of Liberty was a gift from France, what else do you know about Lady Liberty?
When the French sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi (1834-1904) sailed into New York Harbor just before dawn on June 21, 1871, he was seized by a “marvelous feeling of movement, animation.” The trans-Atlantic voyage had been rough, but it wasn’t only the thought of terra firma that roused his spirits. From the ship, he spotted a small island, “the ideal spot” for his planned masterwork, officially titled “Liberty Enlightening the World.” Funding, designing and building Bartholdi’s colossus would take 15 years and an army of workers who assembled the 225-ton iron frame, shaped 300 copper plates for the statue’s skin and manufactured 300,000 rivets to hold it together. (A visitor to his Paris workshop described “hammering, grinding noises of filing, clinking chains; everywhere agitation, a brouhaha, an enormous commotion.”) The final result would ensure that millions of international travelers after Bartholdi would be stirred by the sight of what would come to be called Liberty Island.
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.
