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Maker Projects |
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A series of 'digital making' projects are profiled here where the definition of ‘digital making’ is somewhat wide but is generally taken to be the combination of Design & Technology (DT) aspects of ‘making’ with the ‘digital’ Computer Science (CS) skills of programming and code development.
It is therefore all about the creation and development of physical things that are controlled and managed by software. The activity scope is therefore quite broad, embracing electronics, photography, robotics, factory/home automation, 3-D printing, music, artwork/installations, etc.
Digital making with small low-cost single board computers like the Raspberry Pi, or very low-cost microcontrollers, is not only a fun thing to do, but it is increasingly important to encourage these skills in the context of the extraordinarily rapid Fourth Industrial Revolution that is now upon us. Equipping both adults and young people for a changing society, and the 'digital' world of work that is emerging, is therefore becoming ever more vital, especially in the context of recent reports which estimate that 90% of all new jobs will require digital skills to some degree.
These profiles aim to describe projects that can be built and explored using Scratch or Python code developed on a Raspberry Pi, or by using C++ code, a derivative of which can be developed and managed using the Arduino IDE allowing it to be 'downloaded' to one of the many readily available, low-cost, microcontrollers. Any software associated with a project will in due course be made available as a downloadable file/script from a GitHub site that is being developed here to progessively make available in a more general way all the developed software in a style/format that most developers will be familiar with.
Finally, the profiles also describe various 3D printed components, for which the designs for most of them are being progressively made available at the Prusa web site here.
The links below provide access to all the currently available maker project information: