SYNOPSIS

Programming and electronics learning among secondary students are always challenging tasks to teachers. There are always gaps and barriers that students will say “I can’t build electronics,” “I don’t know enough to write a computer program,” “I’m not smart enough to do engineering”. With the emerging of microelectronic industry, Arduino serves a very good platform to develop teamwork by simultaneously building hardware and software with group of students.  Students learn problem-solving skills that work in a wide variety of math, science, and engineering situations and fly an autonomous flight system. It was introduced in 2012 involving school children, adults and community. During the workshop, participants work in small teams of approximately four members. They start by building a simple circuit that blinks the visible LED to familiarize themselves with the different components and how to program the microprocessor. Once the participants are accustomed to their components and environment, we guide them through the process of building a more complicated circuit. With the circuits built and tested, the workshop transitions to discussing control systems and autonomous robotics. Each team loads software onto their microprocessor that issues commands to their helicopters (via the IR LED array circuit). For a final demonstration of the techniques, each team chooses a more complicated maneuver to fly and programs their system to perform that operation. It shows that learning can be fun, inspire students to learn more on their own and take the skills learned in the workshop to higher levels.


BIODATA OF SPEAKER

Kok Beng Gan was born in Malaysia, on June 22 1978. He has received the B.S. degree in Material Physics from University Technology Malaysia in 2001. He has worked as an Optical-Design Engineer from 2003 to 2005. He is currently senior lecturer in Department of Electrical, Electronic System Engineering, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia and a member of SPIE His research interests include biomedical signal processing and instrumentation.