mono-sense-hat

mono-sense-hat was a project developed as part of introducing a new module to the computer science curriculum at my then high school. A hands on component where students could work more directly with hardware was desired. To accomplish this, using the prize money the school recieved from our prior CanHack 2018 victory, a number of Raspberry Pi computers were purchased along with matching SenseHat boards. The SenseHat mounts on top of the Raspberry Pi to provide an LED matrix, sensors, and a small joystick.

It was important to ensure that the language the students would use to program for the board would match the rest of the curriculum which used the C# programming language. C# is not one of the languages supported by default by the libraries available for the SenseHat. This is why mono-sense-hat was developed; to bridge the code that the students could write and understand to the libraries available for the extension board.

The original library was written by myself and Zonggao Li on the same computer over the course of a few weeks. Some additional improvements were added by him after the final delivery of the module aswell. The other three members of our CanHack 2018 team worked on developing the problems for the students undertaking the curriculum.