Hello everyone! My name is John Liu. I’m a physics faculty at SCSU. I have been using Arduino in my classes and projects for the past several years. Thanks to Art Professor Bill Gorcica for introducing Arduino to me during a campus technology event in 2009, I have been tinkering with Arduino since then. It is hard to describe what Arduino is or does in a few sentences or even paragraphs. Seeing what other people do with Arduino will make you a believer, whether your area is art or science, engineering or education, kinesiology or psychology. I ask you to Google Arduino with one or two keywords of your fields of study or areas of interest. Over 53 million Google hits on the unique word “Arduino” has got to include something that interests you.

I know that there are many of us curious about Arduino. Some have already embarked on a journey of learning and using Arduino in teaching or research projects but we don’t have a means of connecting to one another. We are isolated. I’ve attempted to organize a faculty learning community (not a formal CETL FLC) in the past two years without success. I know the demand to learn and use Arduino is there. Enough faculty and students have reached me asking for help with their Arduino projects in the past few years. My last year’s email asking for interest for a formal Arduino training workshop only reached a limited number of faculty but received several dozen names across the campus expressing interest. Faculty and students are genuinely interested in Arduino in education. But without a community’s support, learning on one’s own can involve an unknown risk, opportunity cost, and certain frustration, although the reward is great (I can vouch for that). Thanks to Professor Plamen Miltenoff’s active involvement this academic year, we are finally getting the ball rolling. This blog will be our place to gather our Arduino ideas, thoughts, dialogues, success stories, complete projects and more. It will improve our visibility as a faculty-led group from almost zero to a very large number! I will be calling for a meeting shortly to first identify who we all are and what we want with Arduino and so on. Faculty, staff, senior undergraduate and graduate students are all welcome to meet and voice their opinions. We are also planning on several one-hour introductory workshops and a few more focused meetings over the course of this semester to involve the whole campus. Please stay tuned and we will be back with more!