At the beginning of the school year, I had a DonorsChoose.org grant written for some Elegoo Arduino kits. I asked my parents to help support our classroom and handed out instructions on how to give via Donors Choose. They stepped up and funded it, and they funded it quickly. Shortly after the start of school, our new Arduino kits were here… and they were awesome.
We got some Elegoo Super Starter Kits, a couple Elegoo Most Complete Starter Kit, and a Smart Robot Car Kit. I already had a couple of other Super Starter Kits, so I was in pretty good shape… but I needed some projects for kids to work through, so I grabbed a copy of each of the following.
Both of these books by Mark Geddes are amazing. Look for a complete review soon from me.
My idea was I am creating a middle school version of centers in my classroom. Arduino is one of the areas students are going to be able to work on, so I wanted material kids could work through while I worked around the room with various groups. These books seem to fit the bill well.
Not too long after getting the kits, we broke them out and got them into students’ hands. The kids were excited to get to actually build something. This was a new concept for them, and they are running with it full steam. We were lucky, shortly after getting our Flexible Fridays going (my name for their centers on Fridays) Elegoo contacted me and asked how things were going, and offered to sponsor our classroom. They had noticed some of the tweets. Needless to say, I said “Of course!” Since then, Elegoo has sent two more smart car kits and three of their new Penguin Bot kits. An unboxing video will be released shortly. I will update this post to include the link. These kits are amazing!
The kits are very efficiently packaged. It is amazing how much they can fit in that little box. A word to the wise, get some of those plastic shoebox sized bins from your local retailer. This way my students can put their kits and their partially completed projects in the bin and they can stay assembled and protected. The components in the kits all appear to be high quality and are easily identifiable.
The students are in the process of building various projects in their kits. They come to school begging to be able to work on them. One student actually came and asked if he could work on debugging his Arduino sketch at home. As we know, when we can get a kid interested enough he/she is asking if he can work on it outside of school, it’s a win.
All in all, I have to say. I have been impressed so far with our Elegoo Arduino kits. Kids are building and coding, begging to get to my class. I have even been tinkering around with one, it has been a while, so that has been fun as well. The Super Starter kits are fairly priced, right around the $35 mark. The Most Complete Starter Kit comes in a bit higher, at about $60. The car kits run about $70, and the Penguin Bots are about $40. These are the prices at the time of this post, on Amazon. Look for more about these amazing little kits as my students complete some of the projects.