Check out the newest tutorial from Erin St. Blaine – just in time for Ada Lovelace Day! Make a lovely glowing bottle lamp with a Circuit Playground Express and a strand of warm white fairy lights. Choose colors or light animations using Microsoft MakeCode, and decorate with your favorite stickers.

This is a perfect first project for kids who are interested in learning to make things light up. It’s easy enough for kids as young as 8 or 9 to make by themselves, and younger kids will love to help out, choosing colors and animations and stickers.

This kit was designed for the Autumn Lights Festival, a fundraiser in Oakland, CA for Lake Merritt Gardens — the garden that inspired the game Pokemon Go! The festival is on October 16-18, 2020, and will be taking place online, so anyone with an internet connection can attend. There will be lots of wonderful featured artists (including Adafruit’s own Erin St. Blaine) showing off their LED and glowing artwork. Adafruit is one of the festival’s sponsors and is proud to offer this kit as a reward for donations to help keep the garden open and free to visitors year round. We’re hoping it will inspire a lot of young makers to create their own glowing artwork.

From the guide:

Make a beautiful rainbow colored glowing bottle lamp with fairy lights inside. You don’t need to catch actual fairies, or chase down a real rainbow, but it will look as though you did! Decorate it with your favorite stickers and place it on your windowsill, and I guarantee you it will attract both rainbows and fairies into your life.

We decorated ours with an Ada Lovelace sticker. Ada Lovelace is famous for being the world’s first computer programmer – she wrote computer programs before computers even existed! I think she deserves to have some art made for her.

See the full tutorial here: https://learn.adafruit.com/glowing-bottle-lamp/overview