A New Blog About Using the Arduino in a School Context

Welcome to the new blog "Arduino in School". This will be a record of a number of projects using the Arduino at St Paul's School in London. Some of these projects are past experiments, and some will be current tinkerings. My hope is that you will find some of the ideas discussed here interesting and that they will inspire you to create some fun things yourselves. Please do let me know (in the comments) if any of the ideas shown here give you inspiration, or if you'd like to get involved in the work we're doing.

As a starter for 10, here's a project I worked on a couple of years ago when I was first introduced to the Arduino platform.

Arduino Tower Bridge from Oliver Rokison on Vimeo.

It's from the days before Tower Bridge stopped tweeting (now back online under a different name), and so the code is a little out of date (in terms of the account it links to) and is a little rough around the edges, but it captured my attention for a fair while, and was a great way to be introduced to the communications potential of the Arduino (something that is a particular focus of mine now).

As a brief aside, I would love to use this opportunity to plug the nanode. When I made the tower bridge project, the combined cost of the arduino and ethernet shield was over £50. For only £20 you can now get a single board with all of the same functionality. We are hoping to roll these devices out more widely to our students, and see what other great networked projects we can create.

All part of the Internet of Things!

I hope you enjoy this blog as it develops over the coming months.