Pykids partners with ASDRP
This summer Pykids partnered with ASDRP . Aspiring Scholars Directed Research Program (ASDRP) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit summer program that provides opportunities for high school students throughout the Bay Area, especially those who are underrepresented in STEM or who are socioeconomically disadvantaged, to conduct high-level novel scientific research.
Students participate in research projects across various subjects in STEM, including chemistry, biology, computational modeling, computer science, and much more.
Pykids curriculum was used on two HS research projects — the links below display the posters they presented in the ASDRP Expo held on Aug 26th in Fremont.
- Electronics with CircuitPython and Micro controllers
- Data Science fundamentals with spreadsheet analysis and Python based tools.
Electronics with CircuitPython and Micro controllers
With this “project based learning” approach, students learnt “hands on” Python application to create an electronic product , a blingy Christmas tree, with Adafruit microcontroller Gemma M0 .
Students learnt how to code , build an electronic circuit, cut, strip and solder wires to create connections, create 3 D print design and finally print the model and assemble the final product — Whew!
This blog post by Les Pounder is the inspiration behind this.
Data Science fundamentals with spreadsheet analysis and Python based tools.
With this project student’s learned tools and techniques to analyze a “real world” dataset very quickly and easily.
They learnt to use Google spreadsheets and built in functions first . Then they used Python and Numpy to create small functions that could be repeated over different datasets to calculate Descriptive statistics concepts such as “measures of center ”, “standard deviation” and plot histograms.
This was a fun project that sets them up nicely for AP Statistics course they are going to start in Fall.
Student Feedback
I collected student feedback via google forms. Quite interesting results — which lead me to think that the projects were a success and some improvements can still be made !
