St Paul’s Computing department was lucky to have a visit from Dr Rachel Menzies, a lecturer at Dundee University School of Computing. Dr Menzies worked with the pupils using our programmable Arduino boards. Pupils got to try out wiring up and LEDS and some even got round to programming their own tunes through speakers that they wired up to the boards.
Twinkle Twinkle Getting started
Arduino at Braeview Academy
Education Scotland have a facility called CPD Consolarium whereby teachers can sign up to the Glow Group and then make a bid online for software and hardware which if successful you can use for loan period, the condition being that you give feedback through a Wiki created for you by Education Scotland.
This past year I have had a loan of Arduino kits which are programmable boards to which you can motors, lights, sensors etc.. and then by plugging the board into your PC using a USB cable you can then write computer programs and upload them to the board. I used the boards with my Advanced Higher pupils and also arranged for Chris Martin from Dundee University who has some experience 
in this field of physical computing to deliver a workshop to my Higher pupils with his wheeled robots made from Arduino boards.
Rather than repeat the information on the blog the link below takes you to the wiki I am working on.
I strongly recommend putting in a bid for some kit as Education Scotland has a huge amount available from Nintendos to PS3s. If my bid is successful I hope to try out some other programmable boards that they have made available.
