We began this project with the intent of making technology more appealing to young students and inspire them to choose a career in STEM once they are older. By introducing youth to robotics and relating it to fashion we hope to inspire students to not be afraid of computing.
An analysis conducted by Business of Fashion found that of the 371 designers who were showcased at the New York, London, Milan, and Paris Fashion Week events found that only 40.2% were female leaving a 59.8% male majority. According to Casad, P. (2018) only 18% of Computer Science graduates identified as women. The fact that fashion and technological trends are primarily determined by men is an inequality that needs to change not only for better female representation in these fields, but also to promote a stronger female influence in the products we use every day. On the flip side, both fashion and technology have proven to be fields that are attractive to men as careers. By exploring the world of fashion and STEM combined, we hope to promote future generations of more equally represented workplaces by providing projects that everyone can enjoy, learn, and begin developing a skill set that will last them for the rest of their lives.
A way to combine fashion and technology involves robotics which is a subject that was of particular interest for both of us. In the previous academic year, we took robotics class and it quickly became one of our favorites courses. For the final assignment, we had to combine all that we were taught in the class and create a robot with at least 2 servo motors and one other module of our choice. We worked together to create a cleaning bot by attaching a lego car to a small handheld vacuum. It looked silly but overall it was a fun project to make.
After taking this class, we were left with an Arduino kit ready to make some fun projects. But neither of us really had the time to start any projects. Having a senior project that involved robotics was the perfect opportunity to experiment and work together once again.
The purpose of this project is to create content for Jr. High and High School students with the intention of allowing them to explore fashion in STEM.
Although fashion is seemingly a female industry, many of the world renowned fashion designers that have influenced the fashion industry such as Giorgio Armani, Christian Dior and Yves Saint Laurent are actually male designers. Since we wanted this project to have an impact on males and females equally by using wearable technology, the topic of fashion and STEM came together as the basis of this project.
Fashion offers a lot of flexibility, the ability to create pieces from scratch and it encourages creativity as there's opportunities to add a personal touch at any moment.
On the other hand, robotics allows for a visual approach to programming, which makes it more appealing and easier to understand.
With the recent declining interest in STEM careers, we hope that with this project we can create activities for teenagers and young adults to enable them to practice STEM skills, such as coding and circuitry, through fashion. With the student’s gaining STEM skills and creative problem solving, we will aim to spark the younger generation's curiosity and ultimately interest them to pursue a STEM career.
Calgary-run MakeFashion is a trio of designers that take advantage of robotics to create unique wearable tech pieces. One of the co-founders of MakeFashion was a speaker at TEDxYYC in 2018 and showcased her creations. Displayed on the main lobby were a group of models wearing Maria's dresses that would change colors with sensors connected to the garments. Since this day, Mari was inspired by wearable technology and with the opportunity to work with wearable tech for a senior project, she immediately accepted.
As part of this project, we performed extensive research on how to inspire youth to consider a career in STEM. Most studies that we found pointed to increased STEM learning from programs that teach STEM concepts such as game development, robotics, cybersecurity and others. These programs provide an interactive learning environment where students can gain creative problem solving skills and confidence. Another way to promote STEM learning is through creating makerspaces in libraries for students to get access to a variety of tools that students can experiment with or learn about.
A study by Woods and Hsu (2020) revealed that there is a gap in STEM course offerings in US high schools and in some cases STEM schools were not available to some students. Woods and Hsu (2020) also pointed out that “rural areas may have less of an opportunity to connect to business and higher education due to the location and resource allocation”. This puts a significant portion of the population unable to attend a high school that has implemented STEM education into the curriculum.
Having online tutorials can help to mitigate this issue since it is more likely to reach a higher audience through online content. For this reason, our work can be shared online to many students by sharing our website or promoting our work to schools in Calgary.
Additionally, Woods and Hsu (2020) suggest that implementing maker studios in school libraries can bring STEM education closer to students and “close gaps to STEM learning for youth from low socio-economic backgrounds and underrepresented cultural groups”. Based on the concept of learning by doing, maker spaces allow students to experiment with a variety of materials and explore areas in STEM with the guidance and support of maker experts or technicians.
Despite the increased demand for STEM knowledge in the workforce, there is a negative attitude towards mathematics and science in middle school students. For this reason, Naizer et al. (2014) and Miller et al. (2019) have found the most success in implementing STEM programs or coding summer camps specifically for kids in their middle school years.
The M2T2 summer program at a Texas University allowed the students to gain significant knowledge in mathematics and science through hands on activities, while relating it so STEM fields such as aeronautics, robotics and game design (Naizer et al., 2014). After the M2T2 program summer took place, Naizer et al. (2014) discovered that "both males and females showed increased interest and confidence regarding math science, technology, and problem-solving" and interest levels remained the same even nine months after the initial study. Moreover, Naizer et al. (2014) believe that the program resulted in a decrease in the gender gap as both girls and boys equally enjoyed learning about science and math, and the students felt more confident in their skills after completing the program.
The University of Southern California, or USC, is helping to promote STEM education by running summer camps for youth, called CS @ SC, with the goal of “increasing interest in CS in particular and STEM in general, among students of both genders that are of diverse economic and social backgrounds” (Miller et al., 2019). Participating universities benefit from running these programs by promoting STEM to youth and also as an opportunity to influence college choices in young students (Miller et al., 2019). Miller et al. (2019) explained that these University hosted STEM summer camps allow students to gain exposure in game development, mobile app development and robotics, with some programs even teaching cybersecurity and 3D printing. In USC’s case, the CS @ SC summer camps teach youth programming skills by using a drag and drop coding interface which ‘seems to be quite appealing to students, who find the colorful, easy-to-use, expressive interfaces to be inviting and non-threatening’ (Miller et al., 2019). Miller et al. (2019) also found that “a ‘traditional’ language such as Python or Java, when taught to students with zero prior experience, tends to be rather discouraging and frustrating on account of their precise syntax requirements; we find this to be especially true for younger students”.
For this reason, we knew that the BBC micro:bit was the perfect device to base our project on. The coding editor required to program the micro:bit uses a drag and drop interface with code blocks that look like puzzle pieces. This makes it easier to explain coding concepts visually and establish the connection that coding is composed of several instructions working together to handle more complex tasks.
Analysis of the data in Miller et al.'s (2019) study also showed that it is possible to close the notorious gender and ethnicity gaps in STEM perception and provide a diverse student population to the STEM pipeline. Miller et al. (2019) concluded their findings stating that “Over a mere 35 hours of exposure to computer science, students experienced an average of nearly a 12% increase in their interest in STEM, with many students stating over a 50% increase”.
Akbar et al. (2018) conducted a pilot program which introduced middle-school aged students to a learning platform presenting learning objectives in a game format. At the end of the pilot they found that 71% of the student were motivated by the program to study computer science, 68% wanted to learn more about data science, 68% wanted to learn more about data science, 64% wanted to learn more about coding, and 57% wanted to seek a career in STEM.
The University of Nebraska-Lincoln has spent more than eight years designing and implementing ways to provide robotics education for over 4000 youth (Nugent et al., 2016). A study by Nugent et al. explains that implementing clubs, camps and competitions would “positively impact the youths’ science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) knowledge and attitudes — and to foster an interest in STEM careers”. In their study, Nugent et al. (2016) collected and analyzed participant data for the six years and noted a significant increase in confidence, self-efficacy, and collaborative problem solving in youth. “Overall, the research results highlighted that despite the differences in goals, format, and curriculum, camps, competitions and clubs can all contribute to youth STEM learning and more positive STEM attitudes.” (Nugent et al., 2016).
Additionally, Stewart et al. (2020) found that “low cost science camps are feasible solutions to bring relevant science focused information to students and that the STEM camps had positive impacts on science literacy and career goals related to science subjects” (p. 2). Further, Stewart et al. (2020) stated that similar coding summer camps saw that "learning from peers and seeing and experiencing how to use learned concepts and knowledge in other contexts emerged as important factors for camp success" (p. 2). Once a post-camp survey was taken, the majority of the participants in grade 8, grade 7 and grade 6 agreed that they learned from the coding activities, enjoyed the camp activities and gained valuable experience from meeting experts in STEM careers. After Stewart et al. (2020) compiled all the solicited comments from the students and unsolicited comments from the parents, they were left with very positive feedback about the participants expressing their interest in STEM careers when they grow up and parents being enthusiastic about their kids attending the camp again next year (p. 4-5).
Along with makerspaces and summer camp programs, STEM based learning has also proved to be beneficial since it tends to influence students to choose a STEM career in college. Although requiring schools to change their curriculum to include more STEM concepts can be expensive and unattainable for some schools, STEM focused curriculums can be another way to boost STEM interest in youth.
Sahin (2017) explains that "high school students’ with high measures of mathematics and science efficacy were more likely to choose a STEM field for their college major. This suggests that schools may need to focus on developing interventions to increase students’ efficacy in science and mathematics rather than merely implement more school-related STEM activities. This emergent finding provides new insight into how school systems may want to proceed in order to promote STEM in their high schools"
"Integrated STEM-based activities lend themselves effectively to providing learning opportunities that not only meet students’ current levels but also extend them" (English, 2017). For example, an activity that involved teaching grade 6 students about engineering to design and construct an earthquake proof building facilitated the students'"appreciation and understanding of how engineering plays a major role in improving and protecting infrastructure and the surrounding environment" (English, 2017). English (2017) continued by explaining that students that participated in the engineering activity were astonished with their work and excitedly shared the experience with their peers. This further proves how STEM learning from a young age can result in benefits other than increased likelihood of choosing a STEM career once they are older.
STEM learning can provide several skills to kids such as creative problem solving, critical thinking and logical thinking. Rosidin (2019) explains that since STEM is comprised of many disciplines, which are useful for problem solving in real life, using STEM learning processes is an effective way to increase a student's understanding of a subject at school. Rosidin et al.'s study (2019) shows how STEM learning led to improvements in student learning since STEM learning has been designed to train student's creative thinking, critical analysis, problem solving, and visualization skills. To support their finding, when the student's took a test before and after the STEM learning processes occurred, Rosidin et al. (2019) found a mean difference of 32.50 between the pretest and posttest scores. Meaning that there was a significant improvement once STEM learning processes occurred and students showed an increased understanding of a subject.
With these academic journal studies as proof, we believe that our work has the potential to increase accessibility to STEM education which can inspire youth to consider a future career in STEM.
Given that technology has been exponentially increasing for the past 100 years, there is a wide variety of fields to choose from that are based on technology careers. With career options such as software developer in the automotive industry, bioinformatics engineer, or even machine learning analyst in the oil and gas industry, it is very likely that there is a field of technology that will be of interest to many students.
Some other interesting careers in tech and their respective industries include:
Bioengineer (Biology/Sciences)
Computer Forensics Investigator (Criminal Justice/Forensics)
Chemical Engineer (Chemistry/Sciences)
Ethical Hacker (Cybersecurity)
Game Developer (Gaming)
Ocean Engineer (Marine Sciences)
Nurse Informaticist (Medicine)
Systems Architect (Information Systems)
User Experience Designer (Computing)
To find out more possible career paths, visit the Mount Royal University pages on the Computer Science and Computer Information Systems programs.
Planning for this project took the longest in our timeline. Gathering ideas from the web or from tech literature wasn't difficult to do, but we wanted to have tutorials for projects that weren't already done by someone else. Otherwise, we are not adding any helpful contributions to the maker community. Additionally, since one of our main goals was to inspire the youth and introduce them to robotics then showing them content that they could easily find online would almost be a waste of time for them.
To help with the idea gathering process, we curated a list of interesting robotics projects that could be converted into a fashion related project or adapted for use with the micro:bit that would also be interesting for kids.
It took us several brainstorming sessions to narrow down that list of projects into the following projects
Light up badge
Step counter
Sun hat
Watch
Spooky pin
Holiday sweater
Mood mask
Flashy shoes
Signaling socks
Motion dress or motion t-shirt
Choosing a BBC micro:bit as the micro:controller for the tutorial series allowed us to use one device with built-in sensors. Another requirement for this project was calculating an estimated cost to make each project. Then we would categorize the projects by difficulty and Solarbotics would sell all the materials as kits for kids to follow our tutorials. We had to ensure that the price would be affordable enough for a parent to purchase for their kid and ensure that the product wasn't a one time use device.
The micro:bit device is perfect for an introduction to coding and circuitry kit because it's affordable and versatile to easily create many projects. It can be reused many times and it's lightweight so it can be in worn. The coding interface is also very simple to use and it uses block programming which is easier to understand and requires less knowledge of logic and coding syntax. Once you understand the basics of coding and circuitry, the different project kids can make are almost limitless.
Another benefit that the micro:bit provided is that it's small and portable, which makes it a great candidate for wearable tech projects.
Although the micro:bit is small and mighty it does come with a few limitations as well. For example, there is a limited amount of sensors that can read data and promptly output it before the values updated. Having code that required tracking multiple sensors, such as the temperature sensor and the brightness sensor for the sunhat, sometimes led to problems with delayed feedback from the micro:bit. That is, when the brightness sensor read a brightness of 200 it would keep updating several times. Thus when the brightness value was displayed to the user, it would first output the brightness of 200 then output several times with the updated values that it read. The sensors are not completely accurate either, but they provide enough accuracy that they can be reliable for many projects.
Another limitation of the micro:bit was the power that we were able to get from it, which was 3V, and how many pins we could use with the I/O shield. For the christmas sweater project, for example, there was a limited amount of LEDs that we could have powered on at the same time. For this reason we made the LEDs flash on and off as a sequence rather than have multiple patterns on at the same time. We also had to consider LED colors and how much power they required to run. White LEDs need more power to be on but yellow and red LEDs require the least amount of power. Thus, we had 2 white LEDs and several yellow and red LEDs for the sweater. Having a reduced number of pins that we could address to also limited some of the complexity of projects that we could do.
Despite some limitations and frustrations, the micro:bit is a device that is increasing in interest due to organizations in the UK and their an initiative.
Since the early 2016, one million devices have been given away freely to each child in grade 6 across the UK ("BBC - Make It Digital - The BBC micro:bit", n.d.). Because of the ongoing support for the micro:bit, there are frequent updates and new additions to the MakeCode editor. With the release of the micro:bit v2 in November 2020, the micro:bit is capable to be used for even more projects with the added microphone, speaker, touch sensors and more ("New micro:bit v2 Includes Speaker Microphone and More", 2020). This was unfortunate because additional coding concepts were introduced, like functions, but they were introduced too late into our timeline and we couldn't include them in our videos. We would have also liked to work with the micro:bit v2 as well, but it would have allowed us to introduce a variety of sound reactive fashion projects that kids would have probably loved.
We designed each project in a way that components that were built in previous steps could be used in future projects or the lessons learned would build up the skills needed to complete more difficult projects. To come up with these projects, we had to closely consider the capabilities and constraints that they micro:bit provided. Additionally, we had to consider the portability, difficulty level and total cost to make each project.
As our action plan, we decided to split up our work for each tutorial as a coding portion and a soldering portion. Mari focused on the coding design while Liam took on the circuits.
I decided to take on the circuit design and assembly portions of the project because I had some previous experience with installing car audio systems. This provided me with a basic understanding of voltage, circuits/wiring, and soldering.
Initially we wanted to come up with some projects that had circuits external to the microbit that didn't require soldering, then introduce soldering for the intermediate and difficult projects. It quickly became apparent that it was difficult to create a project that had no soldering, but was also durable enough to wear on your body as well as appealing enough that a child might actually want to make it.
The first five projects were made to have no external circuits in order to highlight the extensive on-board functionality of the microbit itself, and to inspire ideas for other cool applications. Then soldering is introduced in order to make more complex external circuits, as well as to teach a life skill that can be used in any number of DIY projects or electronics repairs later in life.
For the code tutorials, my plan was to start with coding basics and keep adding more complexity as the projects advanced to increase the difficulty. I introduced coding concepts almost the same way as when I was first taught about coding.
Starting with if statements, adding logic, number comparisons and finishing with loops. After explaining the basics, I figured that the more advanced tutorials would be comprised of combining basic concepts to create complex instructions.
The first 4 projects are meant to cover at least one of the main coding concepts explained in the coding basics videos. I also incremented the use sensors to allow the kids to get some experience with what the micro:bit can do.
After the kids do the beginner level projects, I'm hoping that it will be more clear that the micro:bit has many features that can be combined to create other projects. We didn't get to cover all of the functions that a micro:bit is capable of, but these tutorials cover the main concepts needed to advance to more complex projects.
We had a limited budget to use at the start of this project but we found ways to use it on materials that weren't too costly and had multiple uses. After obtaining our budget, we visited Dave at Solarbotics to discuss materials we could use and what projects we could make with them. Both of us had worked with micro:bit devices in robotics class, but they did not come to mind until Dave mentioned them. Since they are very affordable, we had a lot of room left in the budget to purchase multiple micro:bit devices to experiment with, plus all the other materials that we needed like wires, soldering tools, extra sensor modules, and more.
Another constraint we had for this project was the total time we had to plan, prototype, record and document all of our projects along with our progress. Due to the nature of this course, this senior project would have to be completed by December 18. At the beginning of the project, we looked at how far away that date seemed but it quickly crept up as the semester went along. The time we had available to work on this project greatly varied as classes, work, life and other commitments determined how much time we had throughout the week. We later realized that sometimes we would have weeks where one of us, or both of us, weren't able to work on the project at all. This made it difficult to commit to our initial timeline as we had little control of the actual time we had to work on the project.
Rising COVID-19 cases and increased restrictions prevented us from meeting in person to assemble projects. This impacted our timeline several times since we were able to work together for a while but then restrictions forced us to work remotely for the remainder of the project. Prior to the increased restrictions, we were meeting every weekend to discuss our progress and record the assembly videos.
The last constraint we had was the kits for the projects. Throughout our project, we had to consider the number of usable parts for the project to be cost effective. This is why the micro:bit was the best device for the tutorials since it had integrated sensors that could serve for a vast variety of functions. Other additional tools and materials that were required for the projects had a much lower cost, but still added up to a significant amount.
Since we lacked professional camera equipment, and it didn't make sense to purchase camera equipment, we had to use what was available to us. Furtunately I had an old cell phone with a decent camera that could do the filming. This presented a number of challenges: charging, framing, camera control, stability control, and transferring the footage. The first hurdle was how to easily be able to monitor the camera view when the camera is pointed straight down for the overhead assembly view. Being able to see the screen from that angle proved to be difficult, and having the screen brightness on the phone high enough to be able to see it caused overheating issues after continuous filming. Our solution to this issue was to use Vysor, a $40 software that enables a smart phone to be remotely controled by a PC via USB cable. This allowed us to monitor the camera's view as when as control the camera via the PC to avoid causing camera shake by touching the phone itself. In a typical filming session, the phone would be recording 4K footage for at least an hour, with the on board LED illuminated, and the screen on, while streaming the phone's screen to my PC to preview it. Even with the phone's screen on minimum brightness, airplane mode on, any other unneccessary features turned off, and having the phone constantly charging via USB, this load still proved to be too much. The phone would become uncomfortably hot (although it stopped overheating), and would lose battery charge at a very high rate. Over the course of about 1.5-2 hours the phone's battery would be completely depleated, requiring us to take a break while the phone recharged enough for us to continue filming. The stock camera application also became a limiting factor as chosing areas of focus was difficult and the options were limited. Instead we decided to use Open Camera, a free Android application which was much more clunky but had all the features we needed. One downside of Open Camera was that the focusing algorithms were frustrating to deal with, and we kept going back and for between Auto Focus and Continuous Focus trying to find a setting that didn't require us to constantly remind the camera where to focus. As a result, some clips are slightly out of focus, or the camera pulls focus in the middle of a clip, which was bearable but certainly not ideal.
Prior to begining this project I knew that my PC had some minor issues because it would crash about once every week or two. This was never an issue large enough to justify the time required to troubleshoot it. Once video editing began, however, the issue became much more severe and it was difficult to determine the cause of the issue because Windows Event Log never retained any useful information regarding the cause of the failure. As this started impacting the project I tried swapping out hardware for known good parts, running system tests and benchmarks, and discussing the symptoms with other experts to try to determine the cause without success. Originally I had been using Cyberlink Power Director as I had used this same software around 10 years ago when I used to edit videos for a personal youtube channel. This software used to give me no issues, however it was especially prone to crashes in this instance. I started to suspect that the software itself was the issue, but for most of the duration of the project I had thought that it would waste too much time and energy to try switching to a different software and learning how to use it all over again. Thus for months I continued to edit videos using this software until the final weeks of the project when it was crashing so odten that I wasn't able to make any progress on the videos. I was forced to switch to a different software and I ended up using Corel VideoStudio, a $50 piece of software that wasn't compatible with any of the existing video editing project files I had spent the entire semester working on. Ultimately, a week before the project was due, I had to learn how to use a new editing software and redo all of the editing I had previously completed at enormous expense to time, money, and sanity.
Over the course of this project there were many significant deviations from the original scope. For example, this website was originally mean to be a printed booklet with some text and pictures. Some changes were certainly welcome as they improved our workflow or reduced our ever increasing workload. We did an exceptionally poor job of change management for this project, and had we known the degree to which our scope would change over the course of the project we would have been more diligent about proper tracking and documenting these changes.
When we began working on this project in September of 2020, Alberta's COVID-19 cases were very low and hopes were high for being able to work on this project like a normal two person group project. However, the situation quickly worsened triggering additional limitations that hindered our progress on the project. We were no longer allowed to meet in person to work on the project even though there were certain portions of the workload where we needed to be together in person to complete. Ultimately we had to complete this work over the course of many calls adding dozens of hours to our workload.
With the small sensor size of cell phone cameras it is important to film with plenty of light in or to avoid noise and grain in the footage. We don't have a dedicated film studio or work bench, and had to come up with a solution to provide additional light to our workspace without compromising the functionality of the workspace we use daily for work and other school classes. I was able to find two small but bright USB powered "photography lights" off of Amazon. These lights worked well although they cannot be powered off of a computer's USB port or a powered USB splitter as the power draw exceeded the limits of anything I tried besides a 1 port USB charger like what comes with most cell phones. In an office where outlets were already at a premium, this caused issues because I didn't have 2 free outlets just to power these lights, and daisy chaining power strips was not a safe option since these lights would need to be on almost every day between September and January, so it wasn't exactly a temporary setup. This necessitated the purchase of an additional extra large surge protector in order to safely allow these lights to remain plugged in.
Soldering can give off some very nasty fumes from both the solder wire itself as well as the flux. Normally this isn't much of a concern when the work is performed in a well ventilated area, or a room such as a garage where you may not spend that much time after soldering. Ventilation and proper workspaces, unfortunately, were luxuries we did not have access to. Initially I had planned to complete the soldering at my workplace since there is a proper station for doing this work with adequate ventilation. Once COVID started to resurge in Alberta, that plan was ruined when employees were told that they would be returning to mandatory work from home status. Neither of us own our own home, so we couldn't use a room other than the office without permission, which neither of us had. The only space we had left was the home office, which also happened to be the bedroom in which I sleep. This caused greater concern because not only does this room not have proper ventilation, but I would also be sleeping in the same room afterwards. This increased my fume exposure from only a few hours each day when I work on the project to nearly 24 hours of exposure per day. I made attempts at improving the ventilation to the room but none were very effective. I ended up trying to inhale when not soldering and exhale during soldering, which likely amounted to virtually zero improvment to my risk of respiratory issues. Ultimately I had to make the decision to sacrifice my health for the sake of this project, and we hope it was worthwhile.
With this project, we definitely learned a lot by with working with the micro bit. Even with some circuitry knowledge, with the micro:bit we had to experiment a lot to overcome some limitations due to the device itself not having enough pins.
For this reason, we decided to create prototypes of all of the projects before beginning the video recording process and it was a huge benefit that we did. Just from prototyping the basic circuitry and the code required for each project, we quickly realized that certain steps or procedures had to be modified to work with the micro:bit.
By prototyping with a breadboard, we can confirm that the logical layout of the circuits will work for that project. Without prototyping we would be consuming more materials since we would have to solder the micro:bit on and off of the circuit for each project. Instead of consuming materials to solder each project, using reusable components allowed us to save time, materials and money. Prototyping the circuitry also resulted in implementing the code faster, more effectively and in a more efficient manner.
We also learned more circuitry concepts since for some projects we had to make circuits in series vs in parallel. And of course we learned how to solder wires together and following proper safety requirements.
Initially we had planned to have all the tutorials ready by November so we could send them to friends and families with small kids that could test the kits and tutorials for us. We wanted to know if the content was easy to follow, was anything confusing, too difficult, and so on so we could make changes accordingly. Unfortunately, assembling and recording the projects consumed the majority of the time we had available and we ended up having no time to test our tutorials.
For the website, we decided to go with Google Sites since it seemed like good tool for us to use, and it was, but we didn’t realize that we didn’t have control of the CSS stylesheet or any way to modify the layout with code until it was too late. Ideally, we would have liked to have a website made with wix or wordpress which includes access to the CSS stylesheet to make modifications. Google Sites offered us a good starting point to build a decent website and it was free to use as Mount Royal University students so we didn't have to spend any of the budget on hosting the website.
Throughout this project we certainly had moments where we mildly panicked over a mistake that was made.
One of the most recent ones was not realizing that all of the code from the Make Code site would get wiped out after a browser's cache is cleared. According to the makecode support website, "projects are stored in the browser's cache...If this cache is cleared, then MakeCode projects will be removed." ("MakeCode projects disappear", 2020). This was a frustrating moment since the code for all of the projects, plus some additional ones, were all completed. Thankfully, since we had screenshots of the logic then replicating it didn't take long.
Additionally, we learned that .hex files that contain the code for the micro:bit get erased to free up memory ("Why does the .hex file disappear on the micro:bit?", 2020). With no backup of the code anywhere we had to start from zero and write the code again. Because of this realization, we tried to make it clear in the coding videos that the code should be saved locally to save the code files as backups in case that the cache is cleared by the browser. Another solution for this inconvenience of course would be saving the files the GitHub and that would keep a history of code changes. However, that was not in our scope of what we would teach the kids since coding concepts and circuitry concepts were the priority.
Although we did seek inspiration from fashion and technology literature, we wanted to come up with our own solutions to create these projects. To do this, we avoided looking at other projects or tutorials that are already published on a website or video platform. Publishing our own ideas for these tutorials allows our work to provide a useful contribution to the maker community, rather than provide yet another duplicate tutorial.
Near the end of the project, we were experimenting with the idea of adding a low battery message for the last 4 projects since the micro:bit would get drained much faster with LED strips. After playing around with the code, we realized that something weird was happening. Whenever we would test pin 0 for the analog value or voltage of the battery different values would be displayed at various times. Eventually we made the realization that touching pin 0 would provide the correct values because our fingers would connect multiple pins together and close the circuit. However, this rendered our idea useless because having to close the circuit every time would be annoying. A low battery warning should depend only on the voltage of the battery, not whether the circuit is closed or not.
Despite losing time from our already limited timeline from experimenting and trying to fix things, these moments always led us to learning something new about the micro:bit. Frustrating results allowed us to rethink our process, come up with a better solution and learn from our mistakes.
In the future, we are hoping that this project can be used to teach young students about robotics, show them why we are passionate about STEM and inspire them to consider computing as a career option once they are older. Every year, Mount Royal University participates in the explore STEM event which introduces young women to careers in STEM (Glenn, 2018). Our material can be used for future explore STEM events and teach young women about robotics using a micro:bit and how programming can be fun.
We are hoping that in 2021 we will be able to showcase our project and our research in the Faculty of Science and Technology Research Days at Mount Royal University. As students, we have walked by the showcases of other students research without much thought but after taking on a research project ourselves, we would like to show off what we have accomplished. Due to the COVID-19 restrictions, the next research days event might occur online but having the opportunity to talk about our project will be enough.
Since we don't want our research work to be unused, we hope that next semester our work can be taken to schools in Calgary to teach kids about robotics. Given that kids might be working from home due to COVID-19 restrictions, kits with all the materials can be sent to their homes and then the kids get an online workshop on what to do. If there is a possibility for our kit to get some funding and have the kits be distributed to schools. We have already spoken with Solarbotics, an electronic manufacturer where we got our materials from, to create these kits for us and offer them to parents / students at a discounted price.
We made the "coding basics" video quite early in our development process and since then we have learned a lot about using the micro:bit. We have encountered a number of tricks and tips with the other projects that, in the future, it would make sense to create a "coding basics part 2" video. As we mentioned before, the micro:bit v2 was released in November 2020 and due to our limited time and current goals, we were unable to add those extra concepts to our videos. A "coding basics part 2" video would mention these additional concepts and introduce more projects that use new sensors.
We had previously discussed an idea to create a sound reactive garment but doing so would increase the cost of the kit to add a microphone module. Instead we decided to mention the idea as a challenge or optional project at the end of the matrix shirt tutorial. We introduced a few challenges at the end of the tutorials based off previous ideas we had that we had no time nor the resources to implement. However, we hope that students see these challenge projects as inspiration to go deeper into exploring robotics on their own or at least keep them interested to keep going with the tutorials.
Finally, we would like our work to be tested by younger students which requires submitting our project to the ethics board at Mount Royal. This is to ensure that we are complying with maintaining proper privacy and safety for the students prior to using our research work.
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