Unit 6, Lesson 7, Bubble 5

At https://studio.code.org/projects/applab/lTZ98JIz_MvFuay76mRzaPvT-EIF7n2GLiS48rMBEAQ, when we press the RUN button, we get an error. What are we missing? Something about a board?

Thank you!

Gary

Hi @gellis1,

When I am in Chrome, I get the error message below “Make sure board is plugged in”. But, if I open your project in Maker App, I see it and it is working great! Not sure what device you are using but this should be a good starting point to help you setup your board: https://studio.code.org/maker/setup

Good Luck!
Michelle

app

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Thank you very much! We haven’t done a physical circuit board–unless there’s a way to do it another way, I guess we won’t be able to see it.

Gary

A lot of unit 6 does require the Adafruit Circuit Playground boards. I only have about 15 of them, so I have one board per two students and they aren’t super expensive, although depending on your situation with funding, I understand that varies from classroom to classroom.

Sometimes, you can run the programs without the boards, but usually, there is missing functionality.

If you do have funds, there is a discount for purchasing a classroom set for CSD teachers. Below are the details from the code.org Circuit Playground information page:

Budgeting for the Circuit Playground classroom kit

The full cost of the Circuit Playground classroom kit is $350. All educators receive a 10% discount when they apply the code ADAEDU at checkout, which reduces the price of the kit to approximately $315. Note: The ADAEDU code only applies to orders of $250 or greater.

Hope this information may help you.

Mike

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Thank you, Michael!

Gary

To add on to that, if you (or anyone else reading this) are a participant in the CS Discoveries Professional Learning Program, your facilitator should have information for you regarding subsidies for the Circuit Playground in your Q3/Q4 workshop (depending on how timing works in your region – typically the announcement comes in mid-to-late January).

–Michael K.

Thank you for sharing but why do they wait so late to tell teachers about this? It’s stressful to implement new classes when we don’t know all the information and it’s hard to get money for new projects if we don’t add it to the budget early in the year.

So, hopefully this eases your concerns a little bit, but unit 6 is the last unit taught and only if you are teaching CS Discoveries as a full year course. So, you wouldn’t likely get to that unit until March or April if you are teaching all 6 units. Also, if you take one of the summer weeklong PD Courses, there is usually a subsidy offered for purchasing a classroom set that becomes available in January (if you meet the criteria for that).

If you are only teaching a single semester course, as I know some teachers do, you could teach units 1-3 next year and if you wanted to teach it as a repeatable course the following year, you could offer units 4-6 at that point.

You may also be able to find a grant to apply for to help you fund them if you need them sooner. I know getting funds can be stressful, but as far as courses go, this one ends up being pretty low cost overall as the other supplies needed are all very minimal and even with the Circuit Playgrounds, when they are shared one per two students and they are reusable from one year to the next, they are an affordable way to teach physical computing.

Hopefully this gives you a few ideas.

Mike