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Understanding Boards - Circuit Playground

The Circuit Playground is a round circuit board developed by Adafruit Industries. It is designed specifically for education as an affordable circuit board stuffed to the brim with sensors and programmable bits. It includes things like Neopixel LEDs, a triple axis accelerometer, and IR send and receive sensor. There are two different versions of the board, the classic and the express. They are different and there are lots of reasons to have one over the other. Of course, that all sounds super complicated and technical, but I will break it down for you. The Circuit Playground Classic (or CP), is the original board. It costs less than the newer version but it has limitations. The CP can only be used with Arduino to program it. Arduino is programming language based on C. It's pretty common among open source hardware, so if you start of with CP, you can "upgrade" or move on to different boards that only run Arduino. The Circuit Playground Express (or CPX) can also be program

Getting Started with Electronics and Engineering at Home

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Intro: Electronics and engineering are everywhere in today’s society. Lots of children want to learn and be a part of this world of new and exciting technology. They could be the next big inventor, or the creator of the next big thing. Engineering starts at home. There are lots of low cost options to start creating new and exciting things. Many of these options are even free and online. I’ve lined up some fantastic resources for you and your child to get started with electronics, engineering, and learning together. Code.org Code.Org is a nonprofit that hosts several free online courses to learn coding. They teach code using Block code, meaning that you connect together drag and drop blocks to make a code and complete a goal. You can get started today for free, with no sign ups required and complete an Hour of Code course in less than an hour. Perfect for grade s K-12 Raspberry Pi Raspberry Pi is a low cost single board computer that can be attached to any sc