Very much enjoyed your video.  This is another exciting project.

Nice,  we so far have avoided Auduino's for the steeper learning curve and have settled on wiolinks that do not require any breadboarding or things like that (take a peek here:  https://growthings.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html).  We are about to launch this with close to 800 students starting on Thursday based on an initial pilot.  Our fantastic partner on this project Ben Shapiro is working with Raspberry Pi and creating more sophisticated data tools that we can work with teachers who have no coding experience.  

I can send a link to a dropbox folder in about a week where the revised curriculum materials are being housed.  We are still in writing/revision mode right now for that above said launch.  I will pop over to your video!

Good call on the avoidance of breadboarding.  Electronics have caused as many headaches as programming has.  Some of our pilot teachers are more traditional computer applications teachers (Excel, PowerPoint, etc.) who want to add a bit of programming, and they aren't fans of fiddling with resistors and jumper wires.  For us, in most cases, both skill areas do need to go together to achieve the full outcome of enabling students to create their own automated systems.  But I have been pondering how to bypass some of the electronics with a plug-and-play system that achieves the programming outcomes quicker.  Your tools might do the trick for them, so thanks for the info.  I'll definitely be looking at your materials.

Cool.  We should try to find a time to chat to talk about how to figure out how to work together.  A lot of synergies between what you are trying to do and what we are trying do.

Definitely.  I've already had one of our teachers tell me that he was excited to be able to make his own sensors instead of having to buy expensive ones, so the teachers will benefit from what you are doing.  It may give more direction to how they want to implement our modules as well.  

Hi Joseph,

 

I'm Co-PI on the project. In addition to the wiolink boards, we are prototyping with micro:bits. The reason for this is that here in Colorado basically every school has moved to Chromebooks, and we don't have a good way to make wiolinks work with those. 

Here's an experiment I did over the weekend, with streaming micro:bit-connected sensor data to Google Sheets. I think it has potential! https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1enl78vy...

 

Ben

Yes, that is a signfiicant issue with the wiolinks.  Can't wait for Ben to get those micro:bit links to google sheets looking awesome :).  

Cool  In terms of curriculum, mostly.  some teachers are squeezing it in.  Others only will do it post testing season.  One teacher is so excited and her school got excited that she is creating a full semester long course around the many and varied research projects one can explore.  

We do around practices.  What is a really interesting and challenging design problem is that we are targeting teachers who do not have any experience with coding (or very little).  In the very initial pilot we found it was difficult for students and their teachers to really blend them well.  So teachers would either focus on the coding or the plants.  Those lessons learned led to a wonderful re-design of the work.  What we say mostly is that students were engaged in what would mostly be considered "engineering" related practices.  But we are striving for youth to see how coding is just a part of doing science and that it can help one ask better questions.  

We are using grove sensors (https://growthings.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html) and a fantastic student (Paul Xu) who worked on this project built a fantastic set of libraries that reduce the complexity of the coding. 



Not yet on the food, however, we have another project that this project serves as a feeder (or so we hope):

Changemakers: Food Justice  that also has a video.  That one is much more focused on food issues.

Mary, thanks for the great questions! Our curriculum is module-based, which offers flexibility to teachers to integrate it into their curriculum. Some of our partner teachers spend one or two days every week on this curriculum. This would allow adequate time for plants to grow and the sensors to collect data for students' scientific research. 

We don't have results of whether students made gains in understanding science practices and concepts yet as we are in Year 1 of the project. As Mike mentioned in an earlier post, we are going to run the project with approximately 800 students starting this Thursday. The teachers are excited to spend three weeks on it. We will have results on student gains after this May!

Coding in this project is very easy and simple, thanks for the set of micropython libraries Paul created. Most of the sensors can be programmed using a few lines of code. The curriculum engages students in the use-modify-create progression where students are first given the code and learn to interpret it. They then learn to modify and ultimately create the code to answer their own scientific research questions. 

Some of them we will be.  We won't be able to follow all of them as carefully as we do in our pathway program that we have at Boston College but those students we track.  I'm curious as well as we specifically focus on recruiting youth who aren't particularly interested in science in that program but over time and exposure to different types of sciences they find an interest.  This is why I really like this project, there is a bit of all kinds of science from plants, to physics, to coding... as I don't know how you as a kid or anyone, gets interested in something if you are not exposed to it.

 

Yes, I will post a link to a dropbox of the protocols for making the soil both by our wonderful partner Ludo at Iowa State and our fantastic Ph.D. students and one that one of our partner teachers developed.

Chris Asante, below is our lead on the making of the transparent soil below (so feel free to nag him :)).  

So far it is definitely the coding aspects.  The science teachers have no real conceptual challenges with the transparent soil.  The students also seem to get the conceptual foundation of the transparent soil pretty well.  It is the coding aspects.  Though there has been nearly no resistance from any teacher as they have all been *really* excited to test it in their classrooms.  In fact, we about to launch the next pilot with 700 students tomorrow!