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About The STEM Coding Classroom Administrator Website

This website is intended for teachers or computer administrators that are creating environments that are used by students learning STEM and specifically learning computational thinking using physical computing. Our focus is how to setup and configure computers that allow you to use microcontrollers like the Raspberry Pi Pico on Chromebooks, Raspberry Pi as well as on PCs and Macs.

Creating a great user experience for students using a easy-to-used development tool like Thonny can be challenging. Although the installation steps on the Mac and PC is straightforward, the steps on Raspberry Pi Linux or a Chromebook requires many specialized skills such as using the command line and writing installation scripts using the UNIX shell language.

Furthermore, the latest versions of some operating systems like ChromeOS make it extremely difficult to automatically use USB ports due to security concerns. Many scripts that have worked flawlessly in the past are no longer able to configure a USB port based on events. Manual intervention is required.

These increased security concerns has made the life of a STEM physical computing lab more difficult than ever!

Luckily, we have a new tool: generative AI. These tools can generate installations scripts that are hundreds of lines long that work flawlessly and give detailed step-by-step results as they progress through the installation and configuration steps. The quality of scripts on this site would note have been possible without these tools. We have used OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude Sonnet to generate scripts, verify they work correctly and write documentation for these scripts.

Note that this website is intended for school computer and network administrators. It is designed to complement our other STEM textbooks:

  • Beginning Python - we use Turtle Graphics to introduce students to Python
  • Learning MicroPython - our largest book on physical computing
  • Moving Rainbow - using low-cost LED strips to teach computational thinking
  • STEM Robots - our site built around our low-cost $19 STEM robot
  • Clocks and Watches - dozens of projects where student build and program their own clocks and watches
  • Robot Faces - fun drawing on low-cost but bright screens to give your robot a smile
  • Robot Day - a collection of resources for your school or museum to host a single day event or a course on robots
  • Spectrum Analyzer - a $20 kit that uses a microphone and a display to analyze sound

We also know that many STEM site administrators are using generative AI to help them automate classroom desktop maintenance. We have provide a sample set of prompts you can use to help you get started.

We hope you find these tools useful and we look forward to your feedback. Feel free to use the GitHub issues if you find any areas that need correction or improvement.

Dan McCreary July 2025

Please contact me on LinkedIn