Blue Unit: Computational Tinkering
1B: Essential Coding Concepts
Background Knowledge Probe
Take a few minutes to bring to mind an electronic device from home or work that you use daily. Then think through the following questions as they relate to this device:
- What do you see as the primary purposes for having this electronic device?
- What inputs and outputs do you think are used to ensure this electronic device performs as expected?
- What calculations do you think this device makes with the inputs and outputs to ensure it performs as expected?
The Shaping of Electronics
In the Orange Unit, we worked to demystify the basic electronics and hardware found in the digital technologies of our daily lives. To do so, we primarily worked with the physical electrical components and supporting parts to build a complete, closed path for current to flow from source to ground. That is, we created .
Consider that someone chose to design and provide instructions for others to create a circuit in which a momentary switch push button is placed on a breadboard next to a Raspberry Pi computer in a way that one diffused white LED stays lit as long as that circuit passes current through a resistor to the passthrough legs of that push button on to the anode (positively charged) leg of the LED, then through the cathode (ground) leg of the LED and to a grounded connection. Two other LEDs are placed in a circuit such that they only light up when the momentary switch push button is depressed.
- Why use diffused LEDs and not ultra bright LEDs?
- Why white and blue LEDs and not different colors of LEDs?
- Why is only one LED lit unless a switch is pressed while two other LEDs are only lit when the switch is pressed?
- Why connect the wires and electronics in the way selected on the breadboard and then through a 40-pin to the Raspberry Pi, and not in one of the many other ways they could have been connected?
- Were these all good enough, less than you would have preferred, exceptionally well chosen, or is this question even of importance?
Asking these kinds of questions expands our understanding of the ways in which the shaping of electronic hardware shapes what data is collected, how it is collected, and ultimately its influence on knowledge/power.
How are you being shaped by the design choices in this book? Who is doing the shaping? Why?
In the last unit, our hope was to join together, author and reader, as a learning community to shape the actions of the electronic components through the building of circuits only using those electronic components, thereby establishing complete and closed paths in which an electric circuit can flow. We learned how current flows from a source, through electrical components like resistors, LEDs, and momentary switch push buttons, to reach ground.
We saw how use to bring all these pieces together into a single whole. In this way, all that is apparent is the source entering into the + side of the integrated circuit and then leaving through