S4A (Scratch for Arduino) Project - Robot Car Part 2 - Indicator Lights

Continuing with the previous project of the keyboard controlled robot car and adding indicator lights to it... This is a really simple addition to the robot car, just a few LEDs to act as the car's indicator lights. And modifying the program to blink the LEDs on left/right turns and on reverse.

Additional materials for the indicator lights:

• 4 LEDs (preferably, 2 each in the same color)
• 4 Resistors
• Jumper wires as needed

Valentine's Day Greeting Card - programmed with Scratch

With Valentine's Day coming up, this week I decided to do a fun little Scratch project with my child's class - make animated Valentine's Day greeting cards. The lesson plan is meant to introduce the kids to the following concepts:

1. create animation effects by changing the size of a sprite
2. make clones/ copies of a sprite
3. position a sprite at a random location 
4. provide background music for the animation

I made this sample skeletal program to use as a starting point.

There are 4 sprites in my sample program - Heart Face, Greeting, Balloon, and Heart.

S4A (Scratch for Arduino) Project - A Keyboard Controlled Robot Car

A fun project to create a keyboard controlled robot car... based on the "Robotics: keyboard driven car" project on the S4A site. This to me, is a perfect example of an interdisciplinary project: there is quite a bit of mechanical, electrical and computer engineering involved. This project is being used by the Grade 5 kids in my child's school this year; the kids have been working with the Pro-Bot for quite a bit of time and I felt that letting them create their own robot car that behaves similar to the Pro-Bot is a great finale. So far, it's my favorite Arduino project. Below is a formal lesson plan for the robot car.

Note: This is a simplified version of the car from the S4A site - it just involves creating the keyboard driven car, minus the remote controller. This means the car stays connected to the laptop via the USB cable.