The social community project is basically meant to serve the society. These projects can cover almost anything including the most obvious concerns to any community, the welfare of the community. It begins a small collection of motivated individuals within a community come together with a shared concern. As engineering students it is a must to pave our attention towards problems that suffer the community and find appropriate solutions for those problems. Under the social community project we can implement solutions to those problems giving value to the money that the society has spent to make an engineer.
Objective
The main objective of the project was to enhance the awareness about microcontrollers and programming among school children. The other objective was to illustrate the significance of mechatronics in the field of engineering.
Focused group
Considering the school curriculum and the mindsets of the students, the group members decided with the help of resource personnel that students who are doing Ordinary Level ICT or Advanced Level combined Mathematics or technology stream must be the best choice as the focused group since they have an IT background with analytical skills.
Venue:: Siddhartha College, Weligama, Sri Lanka.
I contributed to prepare a handout to be shared among the students in Sinhala medium. Language barrier is a huge problem in Sri Lanka for school students to restrain exploring novel technologies. Specially learning programming basics. Me and my team tried to address that issue by preparing the handout in their mother tongue and that endeavor was a huge success.
The handout covers following areas
1. What is a microcontroller and what is Arduino – The reader will have an understanding about what he is going to study and what will be the outcomes after referring the handout. At the end the student is supposed to accomplish two tasks.
a. LED blinking
b. DC motor controlling
2. Basic components – Although the beginner knows that he is going to familiarize with Arduino programming, he may not be aware what are the basic components needed to practice Arduino programming. Therefore in this section following components are introduced,
a. Arduino Board
b. Bread Board
c. Jumper Wires
d. Resistors
e. Diodes
f. LEDs
g. LDR
h. AC-DC voltage regulators
i. Transistors
3. Fundamentals of programming. – The beginner needs to have some programming knowledge to work with Arduino. In this section, following topics will be covered which are essential for a basic programming knowledge.
a. Arithmetic operations
b. Logical operations
c. Data types
d. Loops
i. while()
ii. for()
iii. do while()
e. if condition
4. Arduino programming - This is the section where student learns to program Arduino.
After giving the student a understanding about basic Arduino controlling functions, he will be guided to accomplish 5 tasks using the knowledge he has.
a. Task1 and Task2 – LED blinking ( and how to upload the code to the Arduino development board)
b. Task3 – DC motor controlling (H-bridge)
c. Task4 – Stepper motor controlling
d. Task5 – Servo motor controlling
5. IOT Concepts - This section basically gives a introduction to IOT with the help of a NodeMCU. Enthusiastic students can refer this part and widen their knowledge.
The feedback of students after the 4 hours uninterrupted workshop was more satisfied than we expected. That's what we expected and we did it.. This workshop was started by 3 group members. You can see them in the figure above; I myself, Bubbhika and Menaka.
This workshop continues in every year under supervision of Prof. Y.W.R. Amarasinghe. We are glad that we started it. The foundation is the key for every strong building ;)
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