Welcome!

Welcome teachers, students, homeschoolers, Scout troops, robotics clubs, and independent learners!

This sister site to www.parallax.com is our online home for tutorials, projects, inspiring ideas, and teacher resources for Parallax BASIC Stamp and Propeller microcontroller kits, as well as the Arduino.

Here you will find great tutorials that are used from middle schools up to university courses.  The tutorials are adaptable as lab material for many subjects, including computer science, electronics, physics, mechatronics, introduction to technology, robotics, industrial control, and embedded systems design.  In addition, making microcontroller-based equipment for monitoring and recording data is a great addition to field science and agriculture programs.

Authors include the Parallax Education team and contributors from the microcontroller community with a commitment to robotics in the classroom, STEM and STEAM initiatives, and technology literacy in every academic field.

How to Use This Site

Follow the Checkmarks

There are several book-length tutorials on this website.  To help the reader easily see what’s an instruction and what’s an explanation, all of the “action items” are marked with a red checkmark.

  • Follow the red checkmarks to work through the tutorials.

Using the Tutorials Offline with “Printer-friendly version”

Every page on this site has a “Printer-friendly view” link at bottom-left.  Just click on this link, and save the content as an html file, PDF, or printed copy. For multi-page tutorials,  the Printer-friendly link will combine a given page with all of its sub-pages.  Use this feature on the home page of a tutorial to open it as a printer-friendly, single document (which may take a few minutes for very large tutorials).

What are those colored stripes?

To help you keep track of which microcontroller language you are looking at, we’ve put colored stripes along the left-hand side of all example code snippets and  listings:

Python for micro:bit

# Python code for micro:bit is marked with an orange stripe

Propeller C/C++

/* Propeller C/C++ code is marked with a blue stripe */

BASIC Stamp

’ PBASIC code is marked with a green stripe

Arduino

//Arduino code is marked with a turquoise stripe

We want to hear from you!

Please email suggestions and comments to learn@parallax.com.
Printer-friendly version