I love that you point out that students will need to be both patient and persistent. Definitely skills needed in our STEM workers!
One best practice that weâve seen is to organize the students into teams to work on a project and then you can have 1 student wire and then have another student check their work to make sure that they got everything wired correctly. Then the next project they can switch roles.
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This may be a good time to introduce a science journal so they can document their trial and errors!
Love the integration of the arts into this lesson!
I always use special glasses to show my first graders what white light is actually a combination of red, blue, and green! This is going to be such a fun lab to reinforce this especially with the potentiometer! I will admit that I had to borrow my husbandâs reading glasses for this activity to be able to see where everything needs to be connected. I think some students may struggle with that also with poor eyesight, but with the help of classmates I think it would be fine. Again this is something that I would model with my young students, but then let them help to change the code to mix colors making new ones.
This is awesome! I love the connection to theatre! Iâll need to share this with my own middle school daughter whoâs part of the school play theyâre doing next week.
I also agree that it is very difficult to see where to connect the materials. I used my husbandâs readers and told him that I apparently need to make an appointment for an eye exam over spring break! 
I absolutely agree that is will be a great activity for students to get a better handle on color/light mixing.
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I think that we just found another purpose for this experiment. Itâs a test on eye sightâhaha!
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I loved learning about pixels and how every one is a combination of red, green and blue. This lesson really reinforced critical thinking skills to learn how to make the different color patterns. I also loved the potentiometer integration as that is something that we use with our Vex Robotics. We are also a STEAM school so I could see the collaboration with our art teacher in this activity. My 2nd grade daughter loved trying out different values to try to produce the different colors on the wheel. It was great to watch her face as the light quickly blinked off to load the code and then turned into the color she was programming. 
She also was the one to place all the jumper cables for me because her eyes are better than mine! I agree that it is a test on vision as well! LOL! Fun activity with lots of possible extensions in my STEAM classroom and even in my Gifted Enrichment class.
I will add that one of my extremely timid GT students came in eagerly this week and asked what I had learned in AstroSchool this weeK!! I have found through these lessons that her passion is Computer Science. I had never gotten that our of her before now. She always just shrugged her shoulders and said that she didnât know. Now she is sitting beside me wanting to know everything that I am learning! Love how involved she is now! 
Thanks for sharing! We love hearing this!
This is an awesome leson that is tons of fun and has lots of application to the classroom. This could go into the unit on waves and talk about different colors having different wave lengths. It would be a great way to tie the standard science curriculum into math and computer science.
I feel that students would really enjoy this and enjoy playing around with the code to have the light make different colors. This was very easy to follow and feel that made students (8th grade) would find this easy as well. You could give them a list of colors that they would have to make, or have one group of students come up with a list of colors and then have them share with another group to code for those colors. You could make this a race as to which group can code certain colors first.
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Very easy lesson which I think, with some guidance from the teacher, could be taught in a fifth grade classroom. I found myself getting very caught up in changing the code to watch the results and answering many of the lesson questions before I had even read them!
My biggest concern at the Elementary level is that many students might not have the small motor control to easily install all the jump wires and the four pin LED into the bread board correctly. My adult fingers struggled a little, but when I realized I would have to be very precise and take my time, I was able to do it without trouble.
I can also see this lesson as an excellent opportunity to collaborate with our art teacher to make this a fun project which would blend our two classes. We have been trying to work together more this year and I will be talking to her this week and sharing this with her so that we can start working on ideas for a joint project next year!
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Hey, Patrick! I was thinking the same thing about giving students a list of colors to make, or have them create their own challenge list, and then work to create them. Might be fun to give them a box of crayons and let them choose the fun crayon names!
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Linda thats a great idea with the crayons! Or you could have the students try and come up with their own crayon color to add to the box
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I agree with the pixel science. At my school, we talk about the coding, some hardware, but never how screens work. The past few months, students have been asking to explore why some screens show colors and others do not.
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I found out that if you pick the breadboard up you can see better where everything needs to be connected!
This was a fun activity. I agree this could be a great opportunity to collaborate with an art teacher. I will use this lesson with my Middle Makers in the iLab. I can also use it with my third graders and try to collaborate with the art teacher. She is tech-savvy, I am sure she would like this activity. 
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I struggled a bit getting the wires in the right places, but it is a great activity. It doesnât quite fit into my standards, but I could make it work with some of our engineering and technology standards. I think my students will struggle with the necessity to be so detail oriented, but it will be good practice for them!
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Looks perfect! Thanks for posting the picture!