For me to learn something and to be able to teach it I have to go far ahead of myself and then back off – go a little further – and back off again.

Now I have to think about what it would be like to teach this to an unknown group of students. How would I present the Arduino? What tools and components would I need? What would my budget look like? How do I set up a consistent teaching scenario?

Having discovered Autodesk’s 123D has helped me to concretize some of my thinking on this. What I did today was to go back (yet again!) to an early circuit and replicate it using the excellent book Introduction to Arduino, A piece of cake! by Alan G. Smith. I attached my breadboard to a piece of cardboard and attached the Arduino to this as well. This will help keep things oriented well and prevent the Arduino from flipping around when it’s plugged in. It would be my classroom’s culture to keep this orientation when using the bb setup with 123D.

The next step was to create the circuit on the breadboard and 123D:

And then to run them both:

I feel good about this setup because now I can teach circuits using alligator clips and Serial Bus, on a breadboard, and using 123D. Using 123D will help to flip my classroom so that experiments can be made away and brought into the lab for replication. I also find that this reiteration helps to retain the concepts learned.