A Family Course in Coding

Brattleboro is so lucky to have a rockstar science teacher/all around fun guy amongst us—Bob Parks! After ordering a bunch of motion-activated hand sanitizer dispensers that left me feeling uninspired by both their design and reliability, I finally phoned Bob. He and I had collaborated on a bike-powered generator project engaging interested kids a few years back. “What do you think about engaging youth in learning to make a motion-activated dispenser?” Of course, this was way out of my own field and I had no idea what I was asking of him. He did and said YES! We plowed forth and hatched A Family Course in Coding for industrial design. The course was free for kid/adult pairs over what would be 6 weeks. It was awesome and the adults seemed to have the steepest learning curves, myself included. Our circuit boards had one task initially—to dispense a small and adequate amount of sanitizer when a hand was sensed below the spout. Then we added the feature of triggering a sound clip at the same moment. Added to the coding complexity was to have the sound clip play fully before the next clip was triggered, while still allowing the users get more sanitizer.