COMPONENT DESIGN FEATURE KIDS ARE GAME FOR ELECTRONICS DESIGN
As the interview with Stew Edmondson on the page prior suggests, there’s an acute awareness for the skills shortage facing the electronics industry, one that is projected to worsen over the coming years. Therefore, it’s imperative that the government, schools and industry collaborate to confront this head-on. This is what is driving Kitronik, as co-founder Kevin Spurr elaborates
I
t’s an established fact that the industry needs to work with schools and teachers
to encourage the next generation of electronics engineers, coders and designers, and to subsequently help bridge the skills gap. As such, since 2005, products, electronics projects’ kits and learning resources have been produced for schools globally, helping teachers to deliver an education that will equip students of various ages with the fundamental skills to carry onwards into further education, or a future career. Through Kitronik’s experience of supporting teachers in schools and as one of the partner organisations in the BBC micro:bit project and Foundation, the company has found that the best way to capture the interest of young people is to design ‘gameable’ devices that enable students to develop their own technology. Creating products that qualify key skills to be delivered in this way unites STEM subjects, moving coding away from a simplistic teaching method on a computer, and electronics away from generic coverage in Design & Technology. It begs the question: “Why are we doing this? Because it enables this, to do that!” In Autumn 2019, the Kitronik Arcade was launched in this vein, a programmable, handheld gamepad designed for use with the MakeCode Arcade. The device gives students the ability to improve their coding skills by creating and modifying classic games with Blocks and JavaScript in Makecode. Arcade was designed to enable and, to some extent, incentivise students to design; in this instance, the technology created shows the final result, designed
to provide the platform for running the games they create. This is a successful means to motivate learning as young people convert their interest into reality: it shades programming in a relevant context and, importantly, makes it fun. A big part of the design process was for
the gaming experience to be positive and the link between Arcade and MakeCode to be achievable, so that students would not be put off from making their own games because of the difficulty of transferring them to the Arcade. The device, therefore, features a full
LCD wide viewing angle screen, a piezo sounder, and provides haptic feedback through a vibration motor, all of which help to engross users in the gaming experience: the creation has to deliver a playable result for it to have legs as an education method. It’s significant that the Arcade has been designed in consultation with young people aged between 9 and 14. The product is sturdy yet ergonomic, built to stand up to the inevitable knocks. The design enables users to start small and then develop more complex designs for games, or make changes to the Arcade gamepad itself, as their
skills advance: the device features two expansion ports and a debugging port suited to this purpose. The expansion ports provide direct access to the microprocessor pins, and the debug port allows the bootloader code to be customised. This is a deliberate design feature and means that students with more advanced skills can, for instance, assign some pins for multiplayer communication (JACDAC), and then code and play connected games. Arcade provides a starting point
The Kitronik Arcade - a link between student and software
for students to build on and further their knowledge of programming and electronics. To encourage more students to become interested in electronics, it is essential that the initial introduction to the subject isn’t too complex or boring. Kitronik’s range of products and learning resources for the BBC micro:bit demonstrate this design ethos. For example, children can build a cardboard robot with Kitronik’s Simple Robotics Kit, and then progress to creating more complex robots, using the micro:bit to control servos, motors, sensors and lighting. They can also code their own retro games, or play them on the Game ZIP 64.
By empowering teachers and parents to spark and sustain the interest of young people through the design of electronics products, Kitronik is contributing to the creation of the next generation of electronics specialists and striving to close the skills gap, to the benefit of future technologies.
Kitronik
www.kitronik.co.uk / ELECTRONICS ELECTRONICS | FEBRUARY 2020 15
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