Picoboard and Scratch dropin

Thank you for coming over to the Science House last evening. We hope this gave you a chance to play with the Picoboards a bit more and meet other teachers interested in Scratch. The folks who run the Science House were very happy to see you all. ( and if you or you district have a membership, remember that you can access the materials and resources to check out M-F)

We talked about a couple things with the Picoboard:
The overview, the place to order boards, and the software drivers are here at the Playful Invention Company.

I introduced using graphite as a resistive material, but we also used our bodies, and discussed water, sponges and even fruit as a resister. We learned how to show the sensor monitors, and then how to take those values and use them in the note block, so that as the resistance changed the note changed.
Here is a picture of some of the graphite drawings.

Once we had made programs that responded to the sensor by changing musical notes, we created scripts that did something when the sensor board would detect resistance of a certain number. I demonstrated how I could record a sound then after I found of the resistance of an area of graphite on paper - as a numerical value ( between 0-100) I could write a script that played a recording when I touched that graphite area with the alligator clips.

- We did have some bug issues show up and talked about possible remedies. It is good when you create a forever loop to put a tiny delay in that loop wait .1, for instance. Sometimes your computer may freeze using Scratch with the PICOboard. You may have to go down the list trying to force-quit Scratch, as a first step, and rebooting as a final step.

- lastly you all started planning for your visits to each other's classrooms

I know that a couple of you asked about visits - please go ahead and send possible dates and times to Sabrina and Myself and we'll go over our schedules and get back to you.

Again, thanks for a good evening
Keith