Skip to content

About Moving Rainbow

What is the lowest-cost and most fun kit that teaches computational thinking? This is the question that has been the driving force behind the Moving Rainbow project.

We think the answer is the $10 Moving Rainbow kit. Let us tell you why.

Background of the Moving Rainbow

In 2014 the IoT Hackday program in Minnesota was looking for a way to introduce new students to the Internet of Things and to teach computer programming with microcontrollers. Dan McCreary developed a series of projects and tried them on in classrooms. He quickly learned that kids loved working with LEDs and making colorful patterns with rows of LEDs.

However, these projects required lots of individual components (LEDs, resistors, Arduino etc.). Eventually, Dan discovered a new type of LEDs that came in long strips and each pixel contained an individually addressable red, green and blue pixel. These projects were easy to hook up and the students could focus on programming the patterns on the LED strips.

Dan's first "kits" contained an Arduino Nano and only 12 pixels. But he could provide the kits to teachers, mentors, and students for under $25. Since then the cost of both the microcontrollers and the LED strips have come down. And since 2021 the curriculum has shifted from C on Arduino to Python on Picos and similar powerful but low-cost microcontrollers.

Today, the Moving Rainbow systems include kits, instructions for building your own kits and extensive lesson plans on both the Pico and the Pico "W" (wireless).

Color, Motion, Fun and Design

So why pick this specific design? At the center of this design is hundreds of hours of careful observation of students actually using these devices. With each iteration, we continue to build, test, observe and change our design to meet the needs of our students. Here is what we have learned:

  1. Kids love color
  2. Kids love motion
  3. Kids love to have their OWN devices to show their friends and family.

If they can take them home and show them off they take ownership of the skills they need to continually create and expand the features of these little devices.

These principles are simple, but they are well-tested and we think they will persist even as technology progresses. We expect to have more powerful devices and bigger and better displays. But the stepping stones will remain.

Licenses

All Moving Rainbow curricula are licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0). This means you can use and modify the materials in your classroom as long as you don't resell the content for profit.

Contact

If you have further questions about the Moving Rainbow Project by contacting Dan on his LinkedIn page. We are continually looking for schools, teachers, mentors and students that would like to promote computational thinking in our classrooms and at home.