Sensors and Remote Control - How To Assignments

With this chapter add places for sensors and electronics in your frame pages. What technical skills are required to effectively organize a story integrating text, images and video, audio, animation, VR & 3D and now sensors and remote electronic control?

Continue with the assignments below.

Assignment 1: Integrate Sensor Data

• Find a sensor on the Net that you can use in some way with your curriculum theme and integrate its data into a Web page with an account at Google Sites (sites.google.com). Follow the directions at Sensor Data from Pachube to create that page. Link that page into your own Web site design.

Assignment 2: Build a robot with sensors

• In class: use the WeDo software to build and program a robot; use the Lego Robotics kits to build and program a Lego Robotics design. Take some pictures to use in your Web sitedesign.

Assignment 3: Build and place a sensor system somewhere instructionally useful and program it to report data to a Web page.

Relax. This assignment is not quite what it seems which I'll get to in the last paragraph. Not only do you not have to actually build it but you can't meet the parameters of this assignment as that technology is not yet sufficiently simple enough for this assignment, this week. But one these semesters, the technology will advance to the point that this assignment will be affordable and easy to do for those who do not have an electronics and computer programming background. If it was, you would have seen some model assignments of what is possible with a classroom teacher's knowledge base. I'm working on one with more complex and expensive technology.

Next you would be asked to use a data sensor kit to build and place a sensor in a setting where it would report the data wirelessly and directly to a computer where accessing this data over the Internet would graph the latest results. This would be displayable with a click in a frame of your multimedia frame designs this semester. This might be in a temperature sensor an aquarium in the library or a pressure sensor on a squirrel or bird feeder outside the school that is used to report visits to the feeder or flow rate or turbidity sensors in a nearby stream. Webcam systems already come in such a kit for viewing purposes but the more affordable ones assume a wired not wireless connection between sensor and computer. Much less costly plug and play sensors with wireless capacity for a wide variety of applications are coming.

Do not forget that folks in your community do have this knowledge and look for opportunities to discuss such projects with them to give your schools the edge of awareness in this important area of STEM (science, technology, engineering and math). You might be surprised by what a letter home seeking help from parents might yield. 

So,create a Web page titled, Future Sensor Developments. On it, respond to these questions. If you could do this, what would the sensor do? Can you link to a sensor like it some where on the Web?Is there a picture of it or its placement? In what location would you place it for your educational use? What would be the related instructional activities?