LiV Pi Workshop format

[AlfredC]

The purpose of the workshop is for participants to build a LiV Pi indoor air quality monitor under the guidance of the instructor, learn new things and have fun. This is a just a format proposal, in the end each teacher should run his and her workshop the way that serves their students the best. 

Students will bring their Raspberry Pi  together with power supply, ethernet cable and a personal laptop with VNC client program installed on it. Students will be given LiV Pi assembled boards and cases at the beginning of the workshop. In order to assemble LiV Pi, only Philips screwdrivers are needed. At the end of the workshop, students will take home a fully assembled LiV Pi device mounted in an acrylic case.

The minimal requirement for students attending the workshop is a basic understanding of Linux. Students should be able to find their way through the file system on the Raspberry Pi using the terminal (commands: pwd, cd, cp, mv, sudo, chmod, etc…). Students should also be able to use a text editor like nano to edit configuration files.

The minimal requirement for the workshop instructor is to have built a LiV Pi device in the past, be able to present each step of the assembly process, explain how LiV Pi works and answer questions from students. An intermediate level of Linux/Unix expertise is required from the instructor.

The workshop format is “learn things by doing things”. There are no printed teaching materials, no test worksheets and no evaluation papers. The instructor has his computer connected to a projector with the web browser open to LiV Pi DIY webpage. The students can see every action needed to set up LiV Pi. The instructor explains what he is doing at each step of the setup process. Students and instructor are performing the setup at the same time. The format is interactive and informal: students can ask questions at any time and get hands-on help from instructor (or fellow students) if needed.

The workshop focuses on learning computing concepts rather than getting into a detailed and rigorous explanation of Linux internals and shell commands, Python programming, etc… For instance, when explaining the software architecture of LiV Pi, the instructor will show students the four LiV processes (livDB, livLCD, livAPI, livXMPP) using the “ps aux| grep liv” command and take a few minutes to discuss parallelism as a computing principle. The instructor can present concepts related to multitasking in an operating system, Linux processes running simultaneously, functionality provided by kernel, and the functional software stack starting with a Python code on top and ending with device driver interfacing with the hardware at the bottom. The instructor should try to stay at all times at a higher level, discussing concepts rather than diving into details. Students are encouraged to ask questions and take notes that they can review at a later time if they want to dig deeper into the material presented during the workshop.

The instructor has full control over the content, topics, level of detail and duration of the workshop. We suggest instructors to split the workshop into two sessions, allocating at least two hours for each session. We suggest that no more then four students should be present at workshop.