Custom Kit for Education

Other Education Products
1

I am an educator who will be teaching a course in the fall semester, and I am trying to arrange a kit as course material.

I submitted a set of items on the custom kitting service page. The custom kitting page seems to note that some customized elements may be possible: “we can work closely with you to define the necessary parts and develop a tailored experience based on your unique project”.

There was not a place for that on the form submission, so I included a question in the “What items are you looking to include in your custom kit?” entry. The response I received from the form submission was that “Unfortunately, we are not able to assist in kit development, but you are more than welcome to utilize our Forums if you have questions on what products you need.”

I did not see other forum posts with similar kinds of questions, so I hope this is the right place. If not, I would be grateful for guidance in the correct direction.

For the course, the current product listings for jumper wires, resistors, and LEDs are not the best fit. I would be interested to know whether a more tailored option, such as different or smaller assortment packs might be possible on some types of components - as part of the customized kit. If that is not possible, and only existing catalog listed items can be included in a custom kit, that would be helpful to confirm.

2

It’s basically mix-and-match for our current catalog, and then for custom products they’ll try to source them if it makes sense (say, if a school wanted to order several hundred of a custom sensor)

If you’re looking to have pared-down version to try and save on cost it usually doesn’t make sense…like, if you only needed 1 of 5 resistor types in a set it might make sense for us to stock them separately at higher quantities…how many kits are you planning on?

3

Thanks very much for the response.

For this course offering in fall, it will be about 40 kits. This is for a university course on physical computing, where a basic kit would be purchased by each student each semester for use as a course material. The challenge is to compose a basic starter kit for the course at a manageable cost point for our students, alongside textbooks and other materials. The course is expected to be a regular offering going forward, and we are planning to increase capacity.

The target kit is essentially a basic Arduino kit. It would be similar to the SparkFun Tinker Kit (KIT-18577), but with some important differences. The course draws on activities from the Exploring Arduino (Blum 2nd ed) textbook, so has some different project component needs. And we are also hoping to use some of the capabilities of the recent Arduino Uno R4 Wifi as the platform.