Arduino for Kids, founded in September 2021, is a nonprofit STEM tutoring club affiliated with CAST-SD. The four members who organize and teach the event—Katherine Zhao, Katherine Zhou, Katherine Ge, and Leo Zhang—are all high school students from CCA and Bishops. A shared love of electrical engineering and computer science led them to start the project. The mission of the program is to provide young students an opportunity to develop an interest in electrical and computer engineering.

The course structure consists of one week of beginner sessions and one week of advanced sessions. Both sessions are taught daily using the Arduino platform. The beginner session starts with a presentation-style lecture to provide students with well-rounded introductory knowledge covering topics such as electronic components, logic gates, circuit design, C programming, TinkerCAD, and Arduino component modules. With hands-on guidance from the tutors, students learn to wire functional Arduino hardware component modules on a breadboard and then code in C to control the Arduino modules.

During advanced sessions, tutors guide students through more challenging projects across various topics at a faster pace. Students utilize more sophisticated hardware elements and advanced coding structures to complete one to two projects per day. After graduating from the advanced session, students are equipped with the knowledge, experience, and confidence to explore ideas independently and creatively design new projects.

Arduino for Kids held their first session in April 2022 after 6 months of preparation and effort, then continued to hold more sessions in July and August 2022. Each session admits 16 students to maintain a good 1:4 teacher to student ratio. More sessions will be held in 2023 during spring and summer break.