Up to the moment of the presentation, Principles of Engineering students were troubleshooting the lights on the Blue Dolphin Diner. “It should work, based on the code we created,” said Riley, looking at the wiring on the back of the little building.
Just as their guests—Jen Drapala’s marketing class—began gathering outside of the classroom, the entry lights on the diner came on. “Welcome to our presentation of Coding Katonah,” said Principles of Engineering teacher Annabelle Rolland. Her students took it from there.
Coding Katonah is a multifaceted, hands-on project that built students’ skills in drafting to scale, electrical circuitry, soldering and coding, as well as knowledge of architectural styles and engagement with an engineering mindset.
The result is a twinkling village of iconic Katonah buildings including the Blue Dolphin Diner, the Whitlock, Kelloggs & Lawrence, Charles Department Store and LMNOP Bakery. The porches and eaves of each three-dimensional model are lit with LED Neopixel ribbons and coded with a Micro:bit.
“Students see the direct impact of their code on the hardware, building an understanding of how software and hardware interact,” said Rolland.
As the marketing students looked on, Riley spoke to the drafting element of the project. “We used photos of the buildings and drew them to scale,” she said, explaining that knowing that a first finished floor to a second finished floor height is roughly ten feet, they used their sense of proportion to draft the elevations at a scale of 1/4"=1'-0".
Finn described his approach to creating a model of the Whitlock, and the everyday materials he used for the structure.
Soldering the electrical connections was one of the more challenging skills for many students to master. Jacob and Tarun described their struggle to build a strong bond without burning the components, and how the wrong amount of solder resulted in weak connections.
Students flexed their tenacity. “I had to solder five times,” said Finn.
Ryan told the visiting class that the Tappan Zee Bridge and the Empire State Building use a similar system of programmable lights to display various colors and patterns.
Later in March, the Principles of Engineering class will take a walking tour of downtown Katonah to see the actual buildings they replicated. Coding Katonah will stay outside of Rolland’s class; the students plan to code the lights for Pride Month and John Jay’s Class of 2025.