Thank you for your support with the free trainings and the ongoing inspiration of makers, future inventors and engineers, and educators like myself who are always attempting to find ways to integrate TechEd into curriculum. Andy Lindsay was again a superstar in presenting a detailed scaffolded series of lessons that could be used easily work in a traditional classroom. Although the applications can be extended in a number of different disciplines, I found that the curriculum with electronics and micro:bits could easily be adapted to many technology class settings and begged the question for deeper explanations. A great primer for bigger ideas and complex systems ideation!
Parallax’s first educator workshop was in 1997 and used the BASIC Stamp 2, the Board of Education, and a small booklet and hardware kit containing a stepper motor, seven-segment display, A/D converter, potentiometer, piezospeaker, and some resistors/capacitors. The workshops were two days each and taught in the USA, Canada, Netherlands, UK, Germany, Hong Kong, Singapore, New Zealand, Australia, and Taiwan. For many educators this was the first time they’d programmed a chip — and they’d often clap or yell out with excitement when they made a system work as planned. Since the beginning, we’ve personally trained over 10,000 teachers!
Last week, we’ve finished up our winter workshops for 300 teachers. We provided each educator with three days of instruction and one of our kits, for free. Andy Lindsay ran the workshops with support from Stephanie Lindsay and Aristides Alvarez on the Zoom controls, chat, and follow-up support. We’ve shared three videos from the cyber:bot and “What’s a Microcontroller? with Python” workshops, below.
We have also just announced the Summer and Fall 2022 workshops. Take a look at them!
Ken Gracey
Parallax Inc.
