At a recent Propeller Live Forum (middle of the month, on Wednesday), Professor Mike Harrison spoke about the value of using several microcontroller platforms for education, all connected through block programming environments. Using his own stoplight printed circuit board across the BASIC Stamp, Raspberry Pi, and Propeller FLiP Module he teaches 4th grade through university level. I asked him to provide us with an article, as follows. Thank you very much, Professor Harrison!
Ken Gracey
Parallax Inc.
Good afternoon Ken,
It was good to see (and hear) the Propeller Live Forum of engineering talent all together again. I am sorry to say I could not locate any pictures of students engaged with the Traffic Light and Raspberry Pi, but I do have several pictures of equipment.
The RaspPi with its Linux OS has direct programmable control of the GPIO header with digital I/O ports available for students to program in multiple programming languages. This brings robotics and all types of physical computing to the classroom. We must also acknowledge that this is at a very low cost compared to industrial automation components in any factory today.
The RaspPi programmed using Scratch (graphical programming language) is an easy yet powerful ide for students of all ages. The RaspPi PICO is a lower cost option at four dollars per copy, but requires much greater programming and integration skills using its MicroPython or Circuit Python IDEs.
The Scratch programming environment is already in use at the middle school and junior high level with a great deal of success. It is most often used for its graphics and animation capabilities. The GPIO is an extension of the RaspPi that most teachers are not aware of. The Traffic Light circuit board with a female header is plug-and-play on the GPIO with no wiring. I have used this lab kit at multiple grade levels with 4th grade being the youngest group to have a high percentage of success. Grades 5-8 as a STEM project over multiple weeks students easily cycle the traffic light and then move on to handling the ‘input’ from the pedestrian button with more advanced code.
All of the above discussion can be achieved using the BASIC Stamp lab kit with its BASIC Programming environment at a similar cost to the RaspPi. The advantage of the BASIC Stamp is the maintenance if the lab kit with no operating system to maintain the BASIC Stamp is much more robust and is truly plug-and-play. The BASIC language is also a great language for teaching the concepts of coding without the issues of strict syntax.
For my high school visits the traffic light is again my go-to for an ‘Hour of Code’ challenge. And we use the BlocklyProp graphical programming environment. With many of these students having used Scratch in earlier years there is minimal learning curve to get everybody successfully coding and connecting code with NO syntax issues. For the more advanced programmers in the group they like to inspect the C code that the compiler is building from the graphical blocks code. My portable lab kit has various Propeller 1 boards available, but my current go-to boards are the FLiP Module and the Propeller 1 QuickStart due to their low cost and compact package.
It should also be noted that the Propeller 1 boards have an eight core processor and without an operating system to control and limit your creativity you get to really use the multicore environment. The RaspberryPi is dual core Cortex-ARM with a linux OS and its new Pi-PICO is a true microController dual core Cortex which accepts binary executables with no operating system thus acting much like the Parallax micros.
The capstone project for students in my college class is the Parallax FLiP Module playing TicTacToe (Naughts&Crosses). This is on a PCB that I created for this class. Typically over a thousand lines of code to complete the task depending on features the student adds to the game play. Maybe we will discuss TicTacToe in detail in a future newsletter.
A future challenge will be to integrate the Propeller 2 into a capstone project and hand it over to a class to see what they create.
Mike Harrison
Professor of Information Technology
Great Bay Community College
Portsmouth NH
