An Informal Guide to the 30 Days Lost In Space STEM Kit
In this online course we work diligently through Civil Air Patrol’s 30 Days Lost in Space STEM Kit, as a pro bono effort for the benefit and education of CAP cadets and senior members, in order to assist them in completing the kit, when they order it from the Civil Air Patrol. The kit provides an introduction to programming of embedded systems and features an Arduino Uno microcontroller board together with some electronic components, such as LEDs, resistors, and a couple of displays.
Some cadets and senior members may find the kit challenging; we hope these additional explanations, tips, and tricks will help them complete the kit and get more out of it. We also add some additional material and in particular homework — such as an exercise involving human color vision and one involving programming of the video game Pong — to enhance the content of the kit a bit.
If you have access to this kit through the Civil Air Patrol, we highly encourage you to work through it, because it is one of the best and most educational of their available CAP STEM kits. As such, this course is offered for free and is available only to members of the Civil Air Patrol (the nominal fee of $1 on the right is waived upon registration—it is a technicality of the learning management system we are using to disallow public access).
For the general public interested in this STEM kit, it is to be noted that it turns out that this STEM Kit is not actually manufactured by the Civil Air Patrol, but rather by inventr.io. You can purchase the 30 Days Lost in Space Kit from the manufacturer directly online, and they also have their own tutorial guide on their website, which will help you complete the kit, in addition to two instructional video series on YouTube (original, 2023 update).
However, we do not endorse any particular commercial product here and would like to note that there are many Arduino Uno starter kits out there, in addition to the one featured above. Some have more functionality for a lower price, but may come with fewer instructions. We encourage you to do your own research, before making a purchase, in order to decide which Arduino starter kit fits your own individual needs best.
Finally, there are also freely available online Arduino simulators, which will allow you to do everything in simulation in your web browser window, such that you can defer any hardware purchases until you have more experience and know exactly what you would like to get. For instance, the Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense Rev2 is a far more capable microcontroller board than the Arduino Uno included in many Arduino starter kits. As you can see, there are many ways to get into embedded systems programming. Academic Flight also has its own online course. This one here is just for the support of the education of the cadets of Civil Air Patrol.
