Electricity & electronics - Robotics, learn by building

You can open all kinds of doors for advancement in so many careers with a basic understanding of electronics. Think of all of the fields and hobbies that involve electronics to some degree! This "Robotics: Learn by building" series of courses focuses on robotics - which itself is a very diverse field that has application in everything from industry, manufacturing, laboratory work, or military, even in home automation. 

Updated January 2023

With over 31,000 students enrolled and more than 3,200 five star ratings, students aged 8 to 60+ have enjoyed the course and projects.

In this module 1 course, you will build electronic circuits, actually make some electronic components from scratch and use them in your circuits, learn about electricity, soldering skills, and basic analog electronics.  You'll need some basic math skills and that's it! No prior knowledge of electricity of electronics is required, and yet by the end of this course you'll have built functioning electronic circuits like light flashers, sound effects, and controlling the robotics engineer's best friend, the servo motor which is a motor that turns to a specific direction at your command. You will have even connected that servo motor up to read electrical impulses from the muscles in your arm to control the motor bionically. All courses have captions for the hearing impaired.

Start through the lessons today to begin your personal education journey towards your goals - a horizon now filled with so many more opportunities because of your new-found knowledge.

Course materials:

You will need electronic parts and a breadboard, which you can purchase as an accompanying kit (the Analog Electronics Kit) or provide your own.

The first section of the course (available for free preview) explains what the tools and parts are and what you will need if you are supplying your own electronic parts. 

Tools needed: a multimeter, soldering iron and solder, wire,

This course is the prerequisite for the module II course which is digital electronics where you will work with a computer-on-a-chip and hook that computer up to the real world.  In module III you'll learn robotic drive systems and physics, and gain a wide variety of skills in prototyping so you can actually build your own robots and manufacture your own parts.  In module IV, you'll culminate all you've learned so far as you build a 3D printer from scratch, hook it up to a desktop computer and make your own plastic parts.  The 3D printer is, in effect, a robot which you can then use to make parts for your other robot designs. In module V you can take your robot design and construction skills to the next level with a hands-on approach to autonomous robotic systems: learning about various sensors to know where you are and what your robot is doing, GPS navigation, basic artificial intelligence, powerful microchips known as FPGA's where you literally design a custom circuit on the chip, vision systems and more.