Arduino uno and nodejs Johnny-Five

Last fall at the HTML Developers conference I attended a talk about IoT and programming using an Arduino Uno board with a node library "Johnny-Five" which sent updates to Firebase.

Wow

It was cool. So end of last year I bought an Ardunio kit from Sunfounder with the purpose of learning myself but also teach programming and electronics to kids.
Finally after much procrastination, I started this weekend with my son.
We completed the basic hello world exercise.

Tonight we wired and programmed a button to turn on and off an Led.
It took two goes at wiring the board but we got it working. Hold down the button and the light comes on, release it and it turns off.
Example here

I think combining electronics and software programming could be an interesting way for kids to learn. Having the feedback of an Led blink on and off will hopefully stop kids from getting bored.
I'd love to do some kind of tutorial for kids in his school, would be fun.

Tonight I had to bribe my son to participate and he mostly wanted to press the button and and off a lot but he's learning and I'm learning. Hopefully he'll look back in some future time and think about where things started for programming and electronics.

In the meantime we'll work on exercises, I'm hopeful motors and rotors will capture his attention next.


Note: I had to install firmware as outlined here: https://github.com/rwaldron/johnny-five/wiki/Getting-Started#trouble-shooting
When I tried to upload the firmware, I got an error so I changed the port using the Arduino IDE menu Tools -> Port (to the port available), retried upload and upload worked (nice)

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