Recreating The Cuban Missile Crisis

Navigating The Stress of the Cuban Missile Crisis With Copper Wire Submarines and LED Mines

By: Jack Scott

Grade Level: 6-12

Overview: This lesson will be used for any middle to high school classroom going through American history/Modern history. Instead of a lecture on the Cuban Missile crisis, students can learn hands-on how stressful the situation was for American, Cuban, and USSR administrations.

Learning Objectives: Students will be able to recreate a 1960's mine field patrolled by American submarines utilizing Adafruit technology.

Supply list:

Copper Tape (or another conductor attachable to a paper)

LED lights

One CPX

Piece of paper

Markers/pens for labelling ends

Proccess:

make groups of 2-3. If three people are in a group then two people will work on a team. one team will be the USA and one will be USSR/Cuba

All people in a group work together to set up mainland Russia and Cuba on opposite ends of the paper. Russia will have the Nuke "LED" and Cuba will have the launch sites "CPX"

Next, have all of the group work together again on completing the code in Adafruit as seen in the picture. Remember whatever output they choose must be in the right side of the CPX and must be connected to a copper tape connecting to the LED.

Now we construct the obstacle course.

Team USA will spend probably five minutes setting up copper tape and LEDs on the paper in a way to make it difficult but not impossible for the other team to snake another wire through to the end

Once Team USA is done the other team attempts to get their copper wire from the CPX to their LED.

on the way back they will attach to the GND circle on the left side of the CPX

Now turn it on and see how wonderful the light looks!

Final Product:

If students want and you have time, let them switch teams and put copper tape on different parts. You can even save papers from one class to use for another if there is a shortage of copper tape.