Daniel Alich’s DuinoKits
The DuinoKit is an all-in-one Arduino Discovery Kit. It has all of the parts you would need to try new things with your Arduino. It is set up with an Arduino Nano and everything is all wired together in the briefcase. All the user has to do is attach the wires to the specific parts and run the code. Here are a couple of examples that I have been able to put together.
Several years ago, a student that graduated from the school where I was teaching, came back to tell me about a gadget she made in Aero-Space Engineering course in college. This device is attached to a weather balloon to gather upper atmospheric weather conditions and perform data-logging. I pondered for a while why kids in college are starting to learn about electronics and coding, while I have this same technology in my house, and currently in use by my teenage children. The solution was to start a school based club to help share knowledge about electronics and coding at a secondary school level instead of waiting years for college courses.
After this encounter, I requested some funds from the school and bought a collection of electronics parts to support an electronics and coding club at our school. The club was interesting, but had many challenges and over the course of the semester, most of the components were lost, damaged or used in our projects. We had limited success, but mostly frustration and lack of good reusable resources. I realized that I learned about electronics (25 years earlier) on self-contained kits with non-consumable components. These same severely out-dated kits are still in use today in schools, but difficult to find and they do not utilize modern micro-processor technology. I then proceeded to design, develop and test a modernized version of these kits in my school and launched a KickStarter campaign to test market viability.
After recognizing the need in my school for hands-on STEM learning, I developed a non-consumable learning kit that helped in lowering the learning curve of electrical engineering making it easier and quicker to start inventing new gadgets. By combining both electronics and coding it is now easy and safe to gain a better understanding on how electronics work and how to hack and modify existing products.
Students can now follow simple wiring instructions (without soldering) along with sample and tutorial code to build, hack and modify projects and gain a better understanding of both electronics and coding and how they are related in a physical computing environment.
The DuinoKit learning system is the only electronics kit to eliminate soldering and creates a playground of tools for prototyping new ideas in a non-consumable environment. The kit combines with digital learning guides and a online forum make a fun system for use in schools or by individuals.
With the addition of our new product we will have a complete curriculum and project/mission guide along with teacher resources and a companion loose parts offering for when a project is wanting to be completed in a more permanent solution than our prototyping system.
