On Monday, May 15, 2023, I went to the locality of Pintchoumba wjth the goal of equipping the high school students of the locality with the skills necessary to execute a successful project using Arduino and digital electronics. Given that there was so much to cover within a short time, it was crucial that each student be comfortable with programming basics. Thus, it’s extremely advantageous for students to already have a foundational understanding of what programming entails. It made teaching the Arduino language and using the reference tools significantly easier for both them and myself. For the first day, I proceeded to the presentation of the Arduino kit and we reviewed the notions of electrical circuit in Physics then proceeded to a simple project with the LED that they were able to reproduce.
On the second day, May 16, 2023, I took the opportunity to visit the cliff that gave the village its name before joining the students. This time we were interested in working on a traffic light. They reproduced what we did and then I asked them to modify the scripts and especially the delay to see if they understood what we learned. We also subsequently introduced an alarm in the device to signal the red light.
May 17, 2023 was a special day because the day before, there were high winds which damaged what serves as a classroom. With the help of the students, we first started by repairing what could be repaired.
Subsequently, we were able to continue our work, this time we were interested in the motion sensor. Then we introduced an LCD screen and finally an alarm which is triggered after presence detection then the LCD screen displays “Presence unknown”. Like the previous two days, I gave them the latitude to modify the script and reassemble the device, then check that everything is correct.
Thursday being a public holiday, the last session took place Friday, May 19, 2023. The project consisted of using the humidity sensor. The students were thus able to collect data on the soil humidity themselves from the plants that were planted last November and assess for themselves whether these plants need water or not.
At the end of these 4 sessions, the students wanted to thank those without whom it would not have happened in the company of their teacher who joined us.
In the African culture who says thank you, says I want more. I will also thank GOSH and The Alfred Sloan Foundation, hoping that other students in remote areas will also be able to benefit in nearest future.
Documentation of activities undertaken can be found in this repository : https://github.com/ServiceDevInclusif/Digital-electronics-for-High-School-students