Learn About Electronics with Creation Crate

You get a circuit board and all of the components to build the hardware, but that’s not it. It doesn’t work, you also have to program it to get it to work. That’s what makes this unique. There are other projects that you can buy and you put them together and they work great but this gets you thinking and exposes your child to coding as well.

As my son put the components together, we discussed why we were connecting parts to another, how the current would flow and what outcome we were going to expect once we got the circuit working.

The kit comes with a small instruction booklet which also includes the code for the program. You need to download a free program that codes the circuit and it took a good amount of troubleshooting the code before it was uploaded correctly.

This was a good lesson in doing a good and accurate job and gave my son a taste of coding without it being too overwhelming. It took him about 3 days to type it out and then another 3 days to troubleshoot.

Once we got the code right, then our hardware was not set up properly and we had to go back and troubleshoot the circuit. You can also head on over to the website to see a larger pic of the circuit to see what you did wrong. We were experience some issues and I was in contact with the owner, Chris, who I sent pictures into and he helped us troubleshoot and get our Mood Lamp working. Turned out to be a pesky wire that was in the wrong spot. Argh.

There’s no sense of accomplishment like when you’ve put all of your time building something and then actually seeing it work.

Now’s your chance to win your own subscription to Creation Crate, enter the giveaway below to win a 1 year subscription and get a new project every month for a whole year. This giveaway ends November 24th, 2016.

Original article and pictures take http://www.livinglifeandlearning.com/learn-about-electronics-with-creation-crate.html site