Littlebits Elective - students' perspective

One of the winter electives that students got to choose is Littlebits, run by Mr. Bylsma. Many of you are probably wondering what littlebits are.

Mark explains, “Littlebits is when you put little electronic pieces together. The pieces fit together with magnets. With the variety of pieces that we have, we are able to create things like light switches, fans and more! The fun part is that we have to figure out how to make it work. In our first session, we got to play around with the pieces to familiarize ourselves with them and how they work.”

The next time, Mr. Bylsma challenged them with building a railroad crossing.

Thomas explained that they were challenged to build it in pieces. “We first built the circuit for the lights.” Not only did they have to get the lights to turn on, they had to adjust settings on the circuits to get the lights to blink alternating. Next, they had to build the circuit for the arm.

Thomas said, “We had to put the two circuits together- where the lights had to come on first, and then have the arm come down 10 seconds after. As we were putting the circuit together we forgot how the circuits went and ran into problems. So we had to go back and start again. In the end we were all successful. Mr. Byslma even brought a model train and track for us to set up our product to see how it would all come together.”

The next challenge – constructing a bicycle!

Mark’s thoughts about the elective, “Littlebits is fun! I want to be an engineer. I like to make things and make things work, so I thought that this would be a great elective to be introduced to it.”