What is Intersession?
Intersession is a one week long minicourse period at the beginning of the second semester at the Illinois Mathetmatics and Science Academy, a residential high school in Aurora, IL for kids with a knack for math & science. Each student picks one full-time or two half-time Intersessions for this week. Many sessions are taught by teachers and alumni. After helping with the Karate and Self Defense Intersession for three years, a couple of friends and I decided to try doing an Introduction to Microcontrollers class (we could always use more mad scientists!)
What is this Intersession?
The aim of this course is to give students a working knowledge of how to use microcontrollers for their own projects. Microcontrollers are like a magic glue in the electronics world; given some disparate sensors and motors and other outputs, a properly programmed microcontroller can connect them all into smart systems. Check out the "Cool Links" page to see a very small portion of some very cool examples of this.
In the first part of this Intersession, we'll have a crash course on basic and digital electronics. Once the fundamental concepts are in place, we'll move on to programming microcontrollers. We'll be using the PIC16F877A micro. After putting together development boards, we'll let the students loose on an array of components and thrift store electronics toys to develop and build their own projects. At the end of the week, each group will present their project to the rest of the class.
