Free resources for teaching electronics with Mokxi
Printable lesson plans, a 12-week course, a guide to running your first lesson tomorrow, the answers your IT team will ask for, and an honest map to the standards you teach. All free, and every circuit on them opens in the browser.
Printable lesson plans
Twenty-four one-page PDFs: one for each week of the course and one for each of twelve tutorials. Each has the objective, the parts, the steps, a picture of the circuit and an assessment idea, ready to print or leave for a substitute.
The 12 weekly lesson plans
- Week 1: Current, voltage and the breadboard
- Week 2: Blink: the first program
- Week 3: Buttons, pull-ups and contact bounce
- Week 4: Timing without a processor: the 555
- Week 5: Logic gates, as real chips
- Week 6: Arithmetic from gates: the full adder
- Week 7: Memory: flip-flops and counters
- Week 8: More outputs than pins: the shift register
- Week 9: Pulse width modulation and the eye
- Week 10: Serial: making the board talk
- Week 11: Interrupts: events instead of polling
- Week 12: Project week: two boards, one wire
12 tutorial handouts
- Blink an LED with Arduino: Wiring and the Resistor
- Arduino Button Debounce: See the Bounce, Then Fix It
- Arduino Blink Without Delay: Two LEDs, Two Rates
- Arduino PWM Fade: analogWrite, Pins and the Curve
- Blink an LED on the ESP32-C3, Step by Step
- Blink an LED with a 555 Timer, No Microcontroller
- Arduino Simulators Compared: An Honest Roundup
- How to Simulate an Arduino Project Without Hardware
- Digital Electronics on Chromebooks: Labs by Unit
- The 555 Monostable: One Press, One Timed Pulse
- Half Adder and Full Adder: Truth Table to Breadboard
- Flip-Flops Explained: SR Latch, D and JK Flip-Flops
The 12-week course
An introduction to electronics and embedded programming. Each week has objectives, a circuit that runs today, an exercise and an assessment idea. Weeks 1 and 4 to 7 need no microcontroller, so the order is yours.
- Current, voltage and the breadboardHello, breadboard
- Blink: the first programArduino Uno blink
- Buttons, pull-ups and contact bounceESP32-C3 button
- Timing without a processor: the 555555 blinker
- Logic gates, as real chipsGate lab
- Arithmetic from gates: the full adderFull adder
- Memory: flip-flops and countersBinary counter
- More outputs than pins: the shift registerLED bar chaser
- Pulse width modulation and the eyeBreathing LED
- Serial: making the board talkESP32-C3 serial
- Interrupts: events instead of pollingReaction timer
- Project week: two boards, one wireTwo boards, one wire
Use Mokxi in class tomorrow
The whole of it, from trying the first circuit tonight to grading what comes back.
- Tonight: try the first circuit yourselfOpen week 1 of the curriculum and run it. No account is needed. Change the resistor, break a wire, and see what your students will see. Ten minutes is enough.The demo class at /class/demo shows the teacher dashboard with a made-up roster, so you can see the wall, the submissions and the checks before you make anything.Open the demo class
- Pick one of two ways to run the lessonWith no accounts at all: share one project link on the board. Every student opens the same circuit, works on it, and shares their version back as a link. Nothing is stored about the student. This is the simplest start, and the right one for students under 13 until your school has signed off.With a class: make one at /class and read the six-character join code out. Students need an account to join, because a class is a roster. Classes come with Pro and the Teacher plan. To try one first, the free 30-day trial, started from the class page, covers one class of up to forty students with every tool, once per teacher account, with no card.Join codes, rosters and seats
- Hand everyone the same starter circuitBuild the circuit you want the lesson to start from: half wired if the lesson is wiring, fully wired if it is code. Assign it to the class, and each student gets their own copy from the class page.Lock the parts and wires you want held with Lock in the properties panel, or Lock the code from the canvas menu. A student’s copy keeps the locks, so nobody rebuilds what they were meant to build around.Assignments and locked starters
- Add checks, and test them on your own answerUnder the assignment, press Checks and add a few, written as sentences: pin 13 blinks every 1000 ms, an LED is lit, a net sits at 2.5 V, the serial monitor prints a word. Up to twenty per assignment.Press Try it on the starter before you assign. A check that fails on your own solution will fail on thirty.How the checks work
- During the lesson: watch the wallThe Wall tab shows a card for every student with their circuit on it. A card that has not changed in ten minutes asks “stuck?”, so you know where to walk. Press a card to run that student’s circuit and read their sketch.
- After: grade the submissionsStudents submit from the Save menu in the editor. On your side, What came back lists each submission with one line saying what changed from the starter, and a diff of the parts, wires and code.Each student can press Check my work. Their results come from their own browser, so for work that counts, press Grade it to run the same checks on your machine. Quote a failed check into the feedback box, and download the roster as a CSV for your gradebook.
It runs in the browser, with nothing to install
The simulator and the C++ compiler run on the student’s own machine: a Chromebook, a Windows or Mac laptop, or a Linux lab PC. No extension, plug-in, driver or USB cable.
What IT may need to do is allow a few domains in the web filter. These two are needed for everything:
| Domain | What it is for |
|---|---|
| mokxi.com | The site, the editor, the lessons, the class pages and the API. Allow secure WebSockets (wss://mokxi.com) too: live collaboration rooms use them. |
| challenges.cloudflare.com | The bot check on the email sign-up and sign-in link forms. |
And these two if students sign in with their school Google accounts:
| Domain | What it is for |
|---|---|
| accounts.google.com | Sign in with Google. |
| lh3.googleusercontent.com | The profile picture on a Google account, shown on the roster. |
The first time a student builds code, the browser downloads the compiler from mokxi.com, about 70 MB, and keeps it for next time. A filter that caps download sizes should let that through. If your school marks students as under 18 in Google Workspace, an administrator allows Mokxi once in the Admin console before Sign in with Google works.
The full list, the Google Workspace steps and an email you can forward to IT are on the IT setup page. What Mokxi stores about a student, COPPA for students under 13, FERPA, and the data privacy agreements we sign are on the student data privacy page.
Standards map, honestly
Mokxi has not been reviewed or certified against NGSS, CSTA, the AP courses or any state framework. This table maps only where the content really matches, says which part when the match is partial, and lists what is not covered.
| Standard | What it asks | Fit | Where Mokxi fits |
|---|---|---|---|
| NGSS HS-PS3-3 | Design, build, and refine a device that works within given constraints to convert one form of energy into another form of energy. | Partial fit | The design and refine steps: students design circuits that turn electrical energy into light, sound or motion (an LED, a buzzer, a motor) and test them before building. The build itself is physical, and a simulator does not replace it. |
| NGSS HS-ETS1-4 | Use a computer simulation to model the impact of proposed solutions to a complex real-world problem with numerous criteria and constraints. | Partial fit | The simulation practice: predict, simulate, compare against the prediction, and name the model’s limits (every part’s help page lists what it does not model). The problems are circuit sized, not whole real-world systems. |
| NGSS MS-ETS1-4 | Develop a model to generate data for iterative testing and modification of a proposed object, tool, or process such that an optimal design can be achieved. | Good fit | Weeks 1, 3 and 4 of the curriculum: students change a resistor, a capacitor or a line of code, measure again and keep the better design. |
| NGSS HS-PS2-5 | Provide evidence that an electric current can produce a magnetic field and that a changing magnetic field can produce an electric current. | Not covered | Mokxi does not simulate magnetic fields. Use a real coil, a compass and a magnet. |
| CSTA 2-CS-02 | Design projects that combine hardware and software components to collect and exchange data. | Good fit | Weeks 10 and 12 (serial data and two boards on one wire), and the sensor tutorials: a sketch reads a sensor and reports or displays what it measured. |
| CSTA 2-CS-03 | Systematically identify and fix problems with computing devices and their components. | Partial fit | Debugging a circuit and a sketch together, with a meter, a scope and the serial monitor (weeks 3 and 11). It is troubleshooting a simulated device, not a physical one. |
| CSTA 3B-CS-02 | Illustrate ways computing systems implement logic, input, and output through hardware components. | Good fit | Weeks 5 to 8: logic gates on 74HC chips, a full adder built from gates, flip-flops, counters and a shift register, all on a breadboard. |
| AP Physics 2 Unit 11 | Electric Circuits (the College Board unit title). | Good fit | Resistor networks, Kirchhoff’s laws, power and RC circuits, measured with a meter and a scope: week 1, week 4, and the Ohm’s law, series and parallel, and RC time constant pages. |
| AP Physics C: E&M Unit 11 | Electric Circuits (the College Board unit title). | Good fit | The same circuits as above. The RC charging curve is on the scope to measure; the calculus that predicts it is the student’s. |
| AP Physics C: E&M Unit 10 | Conductors and Capacitors (the College Board unit title). | Partial fit | Capacitors in circuits: charging, discharging, and series and parallel capacitance. Not fields, dielectrics or charge on conductors. |
| AP Physics C: E&M Unit 13 | Electromagnetic Induction (the College Board unit title). | Partial fit | RL and RLC circuits only, on the scope (the RL filter and RLC resonance projects). Not induction from a changing magnetic field. |
| AP Physics C: E&M Units 8, 9, 12 | Electric Charges, Fields, and Gauss’s Law; Electric Potential; Magnetic Fields and Electromagnetism. | Not covered | Mokxi solves circuits, not fields. Potential shows up only as node voltages in a circuit. |
States adopt these frameworks with their own edits, and some use their own (Texas uses the TEKS, for example). Check the wording in your state’s document. If you send us a unit, we will tell you which weeks cover it and which do not.
Wording from: NGSS: HS-PS3-3 · NGSS: HS-ETS1 Engineering Design · NGSS: MS-ETS1-4 · CSTA K-12 Computer Science Standards · College Board: AP Physics 2 course page · College Board: AP Physics C: Electricity and Magnetism course page
By course
Three US courses where Mokxi fits, each with the curriculum weeks and projects that match it and a plain list of where it does not.
Questions
Is all of this free?
Yes. The lesson plans, the curriculum, the guides and the simulator itself are free to use, with every board and part on the free plan and no account needed to open a circuit. Class rosters and the class tools come with Pro and the Teacher plan, on the classroom page, and the free 30-day trial lets you try them first.
Is Mokxi certified or aligned to NGSS, CSTA or AP?
No. Mokxi has not been reviewed or certified against any standard. The map on this page shows where its content genuinely matches a standard, where it matches only in part, and where it does not match at all, so you can judge for yourself.
Do my students need accounts?
Not to use the simulator. A class runs from one shared link with no accounts. Joining a class roster, saving to the cloud and submitting work need an account, and a student under 13 may have one only with the school’s consent under COPPA.
Will it run on our Chromebooks?
Yes. It is a web page, and the simulation and the compiler run on the Chromebook itself. There is nothing to install. Your IT team may need to allow a few domains, which are listed on this page.