Hi Dave, I’m a student of the Royal Roads Masters of Learning and Technology program and was fortunate enough to participate in the ‘Intentional messiness of online communities’ talk you gave as part of our symposium back in April. I had asked you about the possibilities of using rhizomatic learning when teaching a craft, and I believe this post is an excellent example of how one might do so.
I too have started experimenting with Arduino and exploring the possibilities of including it in my web development classroom. I have a suggestion for including it in a classroom of 25 or 30. What if you put the students into teams and gave one component to each team member, only telling each member individually what function their individual component serves, and describe what the two sides of their component needs to connect to? For example, the student with the switch is told their component is used to control the flow of power; and that one side needs to connect to the power source and the other side needs to connect to the LED. The student with the LED is told that the anode (long side) needs to connect to the positive flow of power, and the cathode (short side) needs to connect to the negative flow. No, I have not tried this (nor had to pay for someone else to try this!), but I would like to hear your thoughts and feedback.