Teaching Portal

Using PICAXE within High School Education

PICAXE in Education

RudolphWe are fully committed to supporting education. Revolution Education was founded by qualified teachers, and the PICAXE system was specifically developed to support classroom teaching of electronics with microcontrollers.

However we do not believe education ceases when you leave school, so are delighted so many home ‘hobbyists’ are now also using the PICAXE system within their projects. We are not exaggerating when we say that we have both 8 and 80 year olds using the PICAXE system!

If you are an individual home user please see the Getting Started pages.

Setting up a classroom / lab.

To set up a classroom to teach with the PICAXE system we suggest

If you prefer to use ‘BASIC’ textual programming rather than blocks or flowcharts the free PICAXE Editor (Windows) or AXEpad (Mac/Linux) software may be used instead of Logicator.

The actual PICAXE hardware selected then varies depending on your curriculum, national guidelines and teaching style. In broad terms there are four common teaching routes:

  1. Take home kits. These are budget kits where each student solders together, programs and then takes home their assembled kit. Normally used around year 8/9 (age 12-14).
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  2. Classroom Models. Making robots and models move is one of the most interesting ways to stimulate students, and they often have so much fun they forget they are learning! Popular models such as our PICAXE-20X2 Microbot are very popular for this style of teaching. Often used from year 6 (age 10) upwards.
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  3. Curriculum Equipment. Some national curriculum courses, for example the ‘t4’ course in Ireland, have specially designed training resources such as the PICAXE t4 Trainer board, which each student uses to work through a number of programming exercises and tutorials. Naturally this equipment is also available to anyone else who would like to use it.
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  4. Individual project work. This is where students design and make their own electronics project, normally as part of a GCSE or A Level (age 14+) course. The Circuit Creator section of this website was specifically designed to support this type of teaching.

School Budgets

We know school budgets are always stretched. We therefore run two educational support initiatives to support schools on limited budgets:

PICAXE chip + PCB for £1.25

Dice KitWe have maintained the price of this very special offer for the last ten consecutive years. Our aim is simply to encourage group set teaching of electronics with microcontrollers. We believe this is one of the most influential electronics teaching promotions within UK schools within recent years, with hundreds of thousands of 12-14 year old students having successfully built, programmed and taken home a PICAXE project they were extremely proud of.

We provide a PICAXE-08M2 chip, plus a professional quality pre-drilled and etched PCB, for just £1.25 per pair (minimum order 120 pairs). Further more we provide comprehensive teaching workbooks and free ‘onscreen simulations’ of these products within both the Programming Editor and the Logicator flowcharting software.

The products available under this offer are the Dice, Cyberpet, Alarm, Steady Hand and Simple PIC kit.

Full tube educational discounts.

 

Any school/college can purchase a ‘full-tube’ quantity of PICAXE chips at our special educational rates, which include at least a 30% discount. So, for example, in the case of a PICAXE-20M2 chip we apply our maximum discount to just 22 chips (which is the full tube quantity of 20 pin parts).