Arduino is an open source software system that lets you program almost anything into a small circuit board. Combine it with a breadboard with things like lights and buttons plugged into it and you can make many things. We got an arduino board, a breadboard, a instruction book, and tools to make the labs work. These labs were a fun little side distraction from the monotony of just doing our final project for an entire semester.
Lab 1
lab 2
lab 3
lab 4
lab 5
lab 6
lab 7
lab 8
lab 9
lab 10
lab 11
lab 12
lab 13
Overall, what I learned from this was diligence. Every detail in these labs had to be right and you had to double and triple check everything to make sure it was all right. There were a lot of times where I thought I had everything right but there was one or two small things that stopped the whole lab from working. These labs weren't hard but they required you to pay attention and make every detail important. This carries over to many other parts of this class and engineering in general, so I think it is a very important thing to learn.