When I first started experimenting, I felt completely out of my comfort zone because I had no clue about the Circuit Playground Express microcontroller our teacher handed us. And to top it off, it required coding! It really scared me. Since I already had some difficulty understanding English, all those technical terms just made things worse.

But as I went through the experiments, I noticed my confidence growing. I became more comfortable following those operational instructions. I think it's because of my self-efficacy - I believed I could figure out this little device with instructions. Plus, with the help of the teacher and TA, I understood more about the code and technical terms. For instance, in the code, numbers like 0, 1, 2, 3 represent which lights I want to turn on, and I even managed to create lights of different colors. This whole experiment process was really encouraging for me.

While interacting with the Circuit Playground Express microcontroller, I found myself using metacognition to analyze my own actions. For example, if one of my command operations failed, I would think about why it failed and how previous commands succeeded. I realized I was analyzing and searching for ways to succeed.