A special thanks to Brookhaven’s Dr. Dave Biersach for running day 1 of the microcontroller workshop. I heard we had 15 students come – this is especially good considering the snow. Unfortunately Sunday’s event will be postponed until a later date because of the coming blizzard.

Here was the email from Adelphi student John Lund. The pictures were also from John. I, unfortunately, was out of town on family matters.

Hey Professor Wright,

That workshop was really cool, I had a lot of fun today.

My biggest takeaway from today is just how important it is to go and learn some things on your own, or even review old things, but at a slower pace than what you typically see in a course. It can often be hard to get yourself to actually spend time outside of school to do some extra learning, so events like these are especially great for giving us a nudge. Today, for example, was the first time I really ever truly worked with the Monte Carlo method, which I had only known by name from some literature I looked at in the past. I also learned about Numba today, which is something I can see myself immediately making use of.

At the end of the workshop Dave told me that it’s very important for students to be able to see and work with the relationship between coding, electronics, and physics. He also said this to me:

“There are some students who know how to use an oscilloscope, but not many that know how to make one.”I thought that was great since we used a microcontroller to measure the voltage over time in an RC circuit.