A few months ago, we were asked to develop a custom rotating light workshop for Manassa of Innovation who are based in Jeddah in Saudi Arabia. They provide children and their families with access to STEM workshops, and we have worked with them on projects previously with our founder, Su, even flying out to Saudi Arabia last year to deliver workshops in person. We'll share more about that later!

This time we were designing a new workshop to be delivered by the educators in Saudi Arabia so we had to ensure we built a prototype first here in the UK and designed the workshop content and resources carefully so they could be delivered without our input on the day.

A micro:bit Rotating Light

The requirement was to build and program a rotating light that would project coloured patterns as part of their local Noor Riyadh light festival. In this workshop, the children would learn how to control electronic components using code as well as putting their engineering skills to the test by building a structure to support the components while still allowing for movement. In our planning, we needed to ensure that we used resources that would be easy to get hold of so opted for upcycling coffee cups and yoghurt pots to form the main structural components. Two neopixel strips, a servo and a micro:bit later plus the addition of various cardboard templates for the top, we had our rotating light! Once we had our prototype ready we were able to refine the instructions into a clear and easy to follow video, devise a lesson plan and develop the teacher presentation!

The Results

The educator in Saudi Arabia was really pleased with our resources and has since used them to run the workshop twice with different groups of children. The team in Saudi Arabia very kindly shared some pictures and videos of the final results, with each rotating light being displayed in its own box: