CoderDojo Twin Cities NeoPixel Project
Every year since 2014, the local Twin Cities hosts a full-day hackathon designed to get kids interested in coding and STEM concepts. One of our most successful projects has been our LED costume contest. At these events, we purchase Arduinos, breadboards and LED strips for our students. The come to the events at around 10am and by 2pm many of them have learned how to program their LEDs to power their costumes in a variety of different patterns.
During the COVID pandemic we are moving this event to be online so that everyone can still learn to program the LED strips even though they don't have the physical devices.
For each of our labs, we now have a working Tinkercad version that you can use online.
Here is a list of our labs.
Blink an LED
A simple lab to get started. Students have to build a simple circuit using Tinkercad using and Arduino, an LED strip and three wires. They then have to write a short Arduino program to make the first LED blink red.
Link to Lab 1: Tinkercad Neopixel LED Strip Blink Lab