Over the last decade the open source Arduino platform has been embraced by STEM educators, and there are a growing number of pay-per-use resources available with pre-made lesson plans, etc. (eg: becauselearning.com )  While most welcome viable business models in the sector, it struggles against the problem of ever shrinking education budgets. Where the rubber meets the road you are faced with the stark reality that many teachers now have to pay for teaching materials with their own money:

“Classroom teachers spent an average of $468 out of pocket on classroom supplies and equipment in the last year — amounting to nearly 1 percent of an average teacher’s salary in the United States. Nearly eight in 10 teachers — 77 percent — spent “at least” $200, with some as high as $5,000, according to the latest results of an annual survey.”

Teachers also have to teach themselves first, which is always a hard sell to program admins.  With those things in mind, I’ve started this list of links to STEM learning resources, curriculum, and activities for Arduino.  Unlike more formalized lists of this type, the focus here will be on creative IDEAS and resources that teachers can access for FREE ( eg: WeTeachNYC’s Gr9 lesson plans , textbooks online, What’s Going On in This Graph?, fizzixprof, NOAA, etc.) 

This page will grow over time as I find more material.

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Arduino project IDEAS:

Any teacher worth their salt already knows how to make lesson plans, so the tough part is finding a theme that really motivates your students.  If you are looking for science project ideas, it wouldn’t hurt to browse through a few commercial data logger websites sites to see how people use loggers in the real world. (esp: Fondriest Environmental Learning Center ) Then search through the Arduino sensors forum and see if someone has already posted helpful information about the application your students find interesting.  Though the Cave Pearl Project is focused on environmental monitoring, you shouldn’t overlook the other cool things that people do with Arduinos for more information on integrating  sensors (eg: building instruments like the TC1 slinky seismometer) Browsing through the Arduino project hub gives you some sense of the range.  A good number of artists create interactive pieces by adding motion, sensing, LEDs & sound. Wear-able projects are also pretty groovy and you are never too old for some fun & games.  Others create simple robots with their Arduinos, and there are plenty of body/wheel/motor kits to get you rolling. Drones get all the media attention, but I think underwater ROV’s are also interesting.

There are lots of great maker resources to search through if can appreciate their sense of humor (though you might want to avoid clock projects 🙂  Intructables is heaving with Arduino projects which you can find simply by searching for “Arduino” + “sensor”, which will often take you to the larger sites like the Arduino Project hub. Sparkfun has moved their Inventor Kit tutorials over to a teachers resource platform called Workbench, which has recently been acquired by Google Classroom. To give you a sense of that scale, here’s a sampling of just their LED tutorials. 

If you find an Arduino book that sounds interesting, there is a good chance that there are sample projects on the web from the book that you can review.  GPS tracking opens up interesting possibilities and the folks over at the RIFFLE project have been pulling that location data out of digital camera photos, with their data logger hanging from a kite.  So really, the sky is the limit . . . or maybe not even that . . . commander Sparkles

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Most ” Discovering Arduino ” resources follow a pattern something like this:

Introduction of the Arduino board. (hardware)
Introduction of the Arduino programming environment and the structure of a script. (software)
Introduction of the breadboard. (hardware)
Blinking the internal LED at pin 13. (software)
Connecting a LED to Arduino using a breadboard. (hardware)
Using a digital output pin to blink the LED. Using multiple digital output pins & leds (software)
Pulse-width modulation for fading LEDs. (software)
Connecting a button to the Arduino, with de-bouncing cap/resistor combination. (hardware)
Programming  to support the button input , if/then/else conditional behavior. (software)
Introducing the serial monitor for text output of events (software)
Connecting analog sensors to the Arduino with voltage dividers. (hardware)
Capturing sensor readings with the ADC and storing them in a variable. (software)
Using the serial plotter for ‘live’ display of sensor data (software)
Advanced programming concepts (e.g., for/while loops, counters, switch/case). (software)
Connecting digital bus sensors with pull-up resistors (usually I2C or OneWire ) (hardware)
Including code libraries to so you can read data from those digital sensors (software)

As you can see, learning the Arduino platform is like climbing a ladder, where each step you take toward understanding the hardware is matched by one learning how to write code.

Where To begin:
The instructables beginners guide is a good place to start, as is Udemy’s free Learn the Basics Arduino Tutorial. Actually instructables has been busy building a range of free beginners classes on subjects from the internet of things to 3D printing, etc.  There are plenty of other “Getting started” videos available with  another free video course offered at the Programming Electronics Academy (also see their other Youtube videos). Many of these courses require some kind of registration, and given the nature of their business you can expect a fair amount of self promotion messages to be peppered throughout. And finally, don’t overlook the official Arduino example tutorials that come built into the IDE. There are some great learning examples in there like the Tone Pitch follower with tutorials by Massimo Banzi himself. While his quirky style is off-putting to more advanced users, Collins Lab takes the time to cover a lot of basic electronics concepts & tools.

Special Mention:
Be sure to check out Jeremy Blum’s Arduino Tutorials which are essentially a complete course on the Arduino;  all the more impressive because he did the entire thing as a one-man-band while he was still a student. And he’s not alone, Schuyler St. Leger’s Arduino 101 is notable as perhaps the youngest student-made tutorial.   Jeff Feddersen & Tom Igoe have produced some of the the best quality videos available for Arduino for the ITP program at NYU. Jeff & Tom have been producing these videos for a good while now so there’s a lot of great material. If you are just getting started with Arduino, an excellent sub-set might be the Digital & Analog series, followed by their Sensors videos, and then their set on Serial Communication.  Paul McWhorter also has an extensive tutorial series for beginners, though I find his stuff pretty slow going. 

And don’t forget to search for the many other tutorial videos that people have posted. Youtube has grown into a universal self-teaching tool and we’ve entered the game with clips from our fieldwork, and step-by step data logger build tutorials.

Arduino in a Nutshell is a free e-book resource worth looking into, as is the Programming Guide from instesre.org. And though I’m not sure if they are still a going concern, the old Earthshine Starter kit manual PDF can still be found floating around the internet. If e-books like that are your thing, and you are willing to shell out a few bucks, there are sometimes good Humblebundle deals, though those are often in weird combinations of topics, and the individual books also available the Make website. And there are plenty of other free Arduino Programming resources to be found.

Sparkfun is also a great place to look for teacher resources.

It’s a lot to wade through, but the Adafruit tutorial list  is another one of the best resources out there. Just be aware that they have developed their own library “system”, so sometimes their tutorials are tailored to that.

Tronixstuff has a large number of  specific hardware tutorials when you are ready to go further with your Arduino projects, and there are a host of cool Arduino projects to dig through at instructables site. I really believe that you can improve engagement and understanding by providing hands-on experience with real data, but there are plenty of other practical things you can do with the same basic setup.

If you google around, you can find curriculum documents, individual lesson plans, and other resources all over the place, like for example this conductivity lab over at teachengineering.org or this beginners set from Arduino 101.  The challenge is that most of the sites were developed for a different curriculum than yours, so first figure out what you want to tackle, then go sifting through the tutorial sites for material that matches your learning outcomes. Otherwise you will just get buried in the shear volume of it all.

If you want to abstract away the entire IDE interface for younger students, there are a few visual programming tools out there for the Arduino like Visuino, or MIT’s Scratch, for which there are plenty of tutorials on youtube.

Going further:
Once you know your way around the Arduino, Nick Gammon’s Microcontroller Forum is an invaluable resource.  There is also a good set of technical videos at Makecourse.com and on the Forcetronics channel. Though it’s a bit dry, All About Circuits has a complete electronics textbook online [see: Vol. I – Direct Current (DC) ] And if you really want to dig deep, several universities like Stanford, MIT & Berkeley have made full electronics courses available, though that goes well beyond the Arduino landscape. There is a good walk through the UNO sub-components at Rheingold Heavy’s ‘Build an Arduino From Scratch’ series, and Bruce Land’s AVR lectures take you right down to the “bare iron”.  And finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the excellent Mini-notebook series that that Forest Mimms wrote back in the 70’s. Dave Jones eevblog seem pretty weird at first, but the material he covers gets more useful as your knowledge of electronics grows.

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YouTubers on Science & Technology:

Like the other flavors of social media, YouTube can give a boost to your STEM lessons, provided you don’t go down that rabbit hole until after you already have clear lesson outcomes in mind.  It’s hard to pick a favorite, but Ben Krasnow @ Applied Science might take the title because he does incredible things without the over-the-top wow-yuck factor that the media seems to feel is the only way to make science interesting.  When Ben wants an electron microscope – he builds one.  Super Conductor? ditto. Plasma tube? easy-peasy.

Life, the universe, & everything:
Veritasium – An element of truth – videos about science, education, and anything else
Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell – finding a new way to end the human race with every video
SciShow – delves into popular scientific subjects with lots of flash for younger audiences
Physics Girl – Physics videos for every atom and eve
Vsauce – Michael Stevens combines discussions of science and philosophy
BrainCraft – Vanessa Hill explains why we humans act the way that we do
ASAPscience  -explains topics in science with their trademark kinetic typography and drawings
MinutePhysics – physicist Henry Reich explains physics concepts simply  in a few minutes
MinuteEarth – stories about our awesome planet & the critters that live there
TedX Talks
It’s Okay To Be Smart
The Royal Institution – bringing science to the masses for over 200 years
Crash Course – history, science, physics, philosophy, and a bit of everything else
RSA animate
Nature video
Steve Mould

People who put things together:
Kevin Darrah – electronics w Arduino
Julian Ilett – the Bob Ross of Arduino makers
Andreas Spiess – he basically tests every sensor on the DIY market
Science Marshall – complex high level builds
Electronic Basics – by GreatScott
Adam Savage’s Tested – of Mythbusters fame
Peter Sripol – if it floats or flies, he will build one. FliteTest also worth a mention.
The Thought Emporium
NightHawkInLight
James Bruton

People who take things apart:
bigclivedotcom – random take apart videos from expensive toys to cheap junk from China
the Brain Scoop – warning: the Gross-o-meter ratings on those dissection videos are legit
TheBackyardScientist – warning: the Gross-o-meter ratings on those dissection videos are legit

People who explain how things work:
Engineerguy
Real Engineering
Practical Engineering
The Story of Stuff Project – animations explaining how ‘stuff’ affects our society
3Blue1Brown:  Brilliant animated introductions to complex math subjects
Facts in Motion
Numberphile – might give you an ‘irrational’ attraction to maths
PhET – interactive physics simulations
Stated Clearly – genetics & evolution

The Do-ers:
Smarter Every Day – engineer Destin Sandlin doing fascinating experiments
Mark Rober
Cody’sLab
The Slow Mo Guys
Mike Boyd
The Action Lab
Tom Scott

The Story Tellers:
Curious Droid (Paul Shillito)
LindyBeige
Knowing Better
The Good Stuff
TED-ed Animations
Today I Found Out
Nerdwriter – essays about movies, art & culture
Sideways – analysis of movie soundtracks
The Mechanical Universe – A classic older physics video series from Caltech
The Day the Universe Changed – hard to find, but Burke’s 1st series was by far his best
Cosmos – Tyson’s reboot works better for younger audiences. Original is great too.

The incomparable Colinfurze.  Close tie for the #1 spot because Colin is kind of like Ben Krasnow‘s unhinged alter-ego from some parallel dimension where human beings have very short lifespans.  Like ArduinovsEvil , Plasma Channel, Nile Red, and the site-which-must-not-be-named, this highly inappropriate material is best viewed at 1am when you’ve already killed off any high-function brain cells with a 10-hour exam marking marathon. (ie: Don’t show Colin’s videos to impressionable young minds unless you want to be fired, and never show content from AvE, and IFLS without serious vetting)

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Podcasts & Audiobooks:
Radiolab (stories & science) , Quirks & Quarks (science news) , The Science Show (science news) , Freakonomics Radio (econ) , More or Less (stats) , The Infinite Monkey Cage (science) , The Age of Persuasion & Under the Influence (advertising’s effect on culture) , EconTalk , Open Cultures science podcast list ,

LeVar Burton Reads
Free Audiobooks  (streams from Audible.com)
Free Audiobooks  (download to player from Librivox.org)
Free eBooks          (Project Gutenberg)

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Using Social Media to find resources:
Like Pinterest, Reddit has grown into one of the most useful social media sites for leveraging other peoples knowledge to help you find useful resources.  I’ve compiled a short list of places that might be good starting points.  You can also find material with the right hashtags on twitter such as #DIYscience.  But social media like Twitter/Facebook/etc can easily waste as much of your time as it saves, so finding good material is directly related to how particular you are about following people who actually contribute resources to the community (as opposed to those who are merely talking about it)

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Other inspiring links:

What’s the Maker Movement and Why Should I Care?

The Maker Movement in K-12 Education: A Guide to Emerging Research

Progressive Education and The Maker Movement

TED Talk – Massimo Banzi (the primary founder of Arduino) – How Arduino is Open-Sourcing Imagination and you can hear more from him at Arduino: The Documentary

Hans Rosling as an advocate for a “fact-based worldview” with his amazing bubble charts.

Open Culture – a VAST compendium of free cultural & educational media on the web