To explain what the Adafruit Circuit Playground Express is, we first need to understand what a microcontroller is. So a microcontroller is a piece of hardware that allows us to interface with the real world around us, using code and that's what the Circuit Playground Express allows us to do, is write programs that either sense the real world around us or affect the real world around us and that makes it a really fun project for teaching code to beginners, because you get tangible results more than just seeing something pop up on a screen.

If we look at the circuit playground Express, it's in a nice durable form factor and its really made to be used and reused and let's do a quick rundown of the different elements of the microcontroller board.

We have a micro USB slot at the top to connect to your computer, 2 indicator LEDs that indicate on and communicating, we have a ring of neopixels RGB LEDs and those can be lit up any colour and addressed individually, our pins are on the outside edge allow us to connect to outside sensors or lights or devices and they're large so you can connect by using alligator clips or screws or something reusable you never need to solder anything onto this board, which makes for great reusability when it comes to moving from one project to the next. The pins on the outside are capacitive touch sensitive so, they can detect just being touched with your finger, rather than connecting a switch to them and you could take an alligator clip wire and stick it into a lime or a piece of fruit and it would be able to detect when you touch the piece of fruit and you could write a program to react to that. So, continuing there is a thermometer, in the top right corner, there are two momentary push buttons left and right. There is a microphone which is surprisingly sensitive given its size it can detect frequency and sound volume. There's a slide selector switch left and right, there's a connector for a battery pack or a lithium battery, there is a small speaker, there is a light sensor, there's a little bit of flash memory, this is where you store all your code and programs, there's a very powerful M0 processor and there are an infrared transmitter and receiver, so you can send infrared signals just like a TV remote or receive signals from an infrared remote and have that control your code or communicate wirelessly with other circuit playgrounds and there's an accelerometer at the center which returns the position of the board or the acceleration of the board in any direction.

So even contained on the board itself, there's a wealth of different projects you can make in the next section, we'll learn about what makes the circuit playground Express so great for educators and beginners.