Thanks for attending the Arduino class!
You might be wondering what the little circuit board your child brought home is and what it's good for. The board is called an Arduino and it's a programmable microcontroller, which is just a fancy way of saying it's a little computer.
During class we all programmed them together to take a reading from a light sensor and activate a servo motor if a threshold was reached. In practice, this made for a super simple motion detector to make a head turn or a pumpkin move if it 'sensed' a shadow. The code is written in an Arduino variant of C++ that we uploaded using the Arduino IDE. The entirety of it is as follows:
#include <Servo.h>