2023 is the ten-year anniversary of the Cave Pearl Project, with hundreds of data loggers built from various parts in the Arduino ecosystem and deployed for Dr. Patricia Beddows‘ research.
Cheap, simple, stand-alone loggers enable teaching and research opportunities that expensive, complex tools can not. However there are a few trade-offs with this minimalist design: Supporting only Analog & I2C sensors make the course more manageable but losing the DS18b20, which has served us so well over the years, does bring a tear to the eye. Removing the SD card from the previous model means you have to think about memory constraints on run-time. The RTC’s one second minimum means this logger is not suitable for high frequency sampling – so you are not going to use it for experiments in eddy flux covariance or seismology. UV exposure makes the 50ml tubes brittle after about four months in full sun, and the coin cell limits operation to environments that don’t go much below freezing – although it’s easy enough to convert the logger to use two lithium AAA’s and we’ve tested those down to -15°C.
See the video below and how to build the loggers in the post here.
Stephen Hawking once said, “No one undertakes research in physics with the intention of winning a prize. It is the joy of discovering something no one knew before.” That joy is exactly what we hope to ignite with Arduino’s Science Kit R3, bridging theory with practical exploration with a complete toolbox that science teachers can use to develop hands-on and engaging STEM experiments in the classroom.
From the relationship between color and temperature to the effects of electrical currents on magnetic fields, the kit provides a comprehensive learning experience that allows students to interact with the very core of scientific investigations – also through real-time data collection and analysis. By measuring, recording, and interpreting data with theArduino Science Journal app, the learning process becomes interactive and dynamic.
So, how does the Science Kit R3 make physics the coolest subject in school?
Enhanced understanding of physics: No more passive reading. Dive deep into physics, understanding complex concepts through hands-on experimentation.
Promotion of scientific literacy: The real-time data collection and analysis features nurture scientific inquiry skills, priming students to thrive in our data-driven world.
User-friendly design: No prior coding or electronics knowledge is required, ensuring educators and students can jump straight into experiments with minimal setup.
Designed for education: The kit has been designed with teachers, for teachers and students.
Critical thinking stimulation: The kit’s design encourages students to apply what they’ve learned to real-world situations, sharpening their problem-solving abilities.
Self-directed learning: Through open-ended investigations, we’re giving students the reins, allowing their curiosity to guide their learning process.
Comprehensive teaching support: The Science Kit R3 isn’t just for students. We’ve also equipped educators with an intuitive guide to streamline the teaching process.
Hopefully you’ve been with us during the roller-coaster ride of Arduino EDUvision season 4, which just came to a close. We’ve had a wonderful time, and the response from the community has been outstanding.
Arduino EDUvision began life as a way to compensate for the lack of in-person events during 2020. And now we’ve already live streamed 40 episodes, with thousands of viewers tuning in each week as we interview guests from across education, tech, science and STEM.
EDUvision Season 4 Podcast
This latest season, which wrapped on 11th November, also broke out into an accompanying podcast.
Over the months, and with so many episodes under the EDUvision umbrella, we’ve had some amazing guests. The conversations you see in the episodes are only the tip of the interview iceberg. The new podcast gives Arduino fans the opportunity to listen to the full conversations that Melissa and Roxana have with the guests.
The subjects go so much deeper, and there’s so much more to learn from these amazing, entertaining thought leaders who share their time with us all.
You can listen to the Arduino EDUvision podcast anywhere you like. Here are a few links so you can catch up on the exciting edtech, STEM and science subjects we’ve delved into this season.
The good news is that all the EDUvision live streams remain online. So you can still watch them at your convenience. It’s been a really exciting season thanks to the diverse and fascinating guests who’ve shared their insights, work and projects with us.
Educational technology expert Damien Kee joined us to celebrate International Programmers’ Day in the first episode. Stick around until the end, when he took the opportunity to show off his amazing DIY R2-D2.
There was an outpouring of excitement from the Arduino community when Locomation’s Çetin Meriçli showed us what the future has in store for self-driving trucks and cars.
And Dr. Erica Colón from YouTube’s Nitty Gritty Science rounded out the season. She dazzled us with an amazing array of science projects you can do at home.
The famous and fabulous Hip Hop Scientist visited us for Halloween. We had a great discussion about bridging the gap between music and science by bringing it into everyday pop culture.
Note: Google Drive is available to all users over the age of 14. This is so we adhere to the COPPA compliance requirements for students under 14-years-old.
Students and teachers can now sync Google Drive with their Arduino Science Journal experiments. This means you can access experiments from any device using your Arduino account. The brand new Google Drive integration is available now through the latest app update.
Benefits of using Google Drive
You can benefit from Google Drive sync immediately. Simply sign in with your Arduino account and authenticate the Google Drive connection. Then select the folder where you want to back up your experiments. From then on, all your experiments will be accessible from any devices whenever you log in.
Don’t worry. You’ll still be able to use Arduino Science Journal without logging in. But your experiments won’t be associated with your Arduino account, and will only be locally stored.
What else is new?
You’ll also find new useful links on the sidebar of your app, so learning becomes even simpler. With just a few clicks, you’ll be able to access the free Science Journal activities, browse the help center articles, and learn more about the Arduino Science Kit straight from the app.
The Arduino Science Journal content platform welcomes seven new activities, as well as great new partners and content creators. The Tech Interactive, Alison Green and Isabella Liu have helped us create some amazing new lessons. Check them out here.
You will be able to experiment with motion and sound, as well as a step-by-step guide to help you access Google Drive on your Science Journal app!
We’re also delighted that the Arduino Science Journal is certified by the Educational App Store with a 4-star rating!
We’ve helped hundreds of thousands of educators with remote teaching, and we strive to make data literacy and scientific thinking more accessible, wherever you are. If you’re an Arduino Science Journal user, you can help out by recommending the app to your fellow educators. And we’d love to hear how you are using the app in your classroom!
Tag us on social media to show us what you’re working on with #ScienceJournal.
If you don’t have the app already, join over 700,000 other teachers, students and makers by downloading it now!
The last year has clearly been challenging for educators around the world due to the pandemic. Yet despite these difficult times, educators and students haven’t stopped getting hands-on and experimenting with STEM.
But how is it possible to create a systematic environment for student ideas through scientific observation when the science lab is no longer accessible?
It’s down to creativity and innovation, which haven’t been put on hold even during a pandemic. Teachers have had to adapt quickly to this fast-changing environment, and technologies like Arduino have supported this adaptation, providing educators with flexible tools to keep experimenting from home.
Arduino is committed to making STEM accessible for all students, with free tools and resources like the Arduino Science Journal app to collect data, leveraging either your mobile device or external sensors connected to Arduino, or a portable science lab for your remote needs (now on sale).
Teachers can also take advantage of different boards to experiment with science, which is what UK-based physics teacher, Alan Bates, did. Bates created an experiment to demonstrate the phenomenon known as the conservation of momentum, published in the February edition of The Physics Teacher.
Bates combined an Arduino Uno Rev3 and a PASCO Smart Cart to create a movable rubber band launcher to investigate the conservation of momentum, and the energy transferred by the system as the potential energy of the rubber band is released. The Arduino board was used instead to activate the motion releasing the rubber band, and consequently, the cart.
The launcher was made with a wooden stick, a nail, and the rubber band, placed on a low-friction track, and mounted on top of a PASCO smart cart base. Masses are added to the cart every three measurements of recoil velocity.
Thanks to this scientific investigation, Bates was able to demonstrate and verify that, “elastic potential energy is not only transferred into kinetic energy, but also into other types of energy that include thermal and sound energy.”
For more information on the findings and analysis of the Conservation of Momentum with Dual Technologies, get your copy of the February edition of The Physics Teacher.
This post was written by Valentina Chinnici, Arduino Product Manager.
Arduino and Google are excited to announce that the Science Journal app will be transferring from Google to Arduino this September! Arduino’s existing experience with the Science Journal and a long-standing commitment to open source and hands-on science has been crucial to the transfer ownership of the open source project over to Arduino.
The Google versions of the app will officially cease support and updates on December 11th, 2020, with Arduino continuing all support and app development moving forward, including a brand new Arduino integration for iOS.
Arduino Science Journal will include support for the Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense board, as well as the Arduino Science Kit, with students able to document science experiments and record observations using their own Android or iOS device. The Science Journal actively encourages students to learn outside of the classroom, delivering accessible resources to support both teachers and students for remote or in person activities. For developers, the Arduino version will continue to be open: codes, APIs, and firmware to help them create innovative new projects.
“Arduino’s heritage in both education and open source makes us the ideal partner to take on and develop the great work started by Google with the Science Journal,”commented Fabio Violante, Arduino CEO. “After all, Arduino has been enabling hands-on learning experiences for students and hobbyists since they were founded in 2005. Our mission is to shape the future of the next generation of STEAM leaders, and allow them to have a more equitable and affordable access to complete, hands-on, and engaging learning experiences, in line with UN Sustainable Goals of Quality Education.”
In 2019, we released the Arduino Science Kit, an Arduino-based physics lab that’s fully compatible with the Science Journal. Moving forward, all new updates to the app will take place through Arduino’s new version of the Science Journal, available in September.
The new Arduino version of the app will still be free and open to let users measure the world around them using the capabilities built into their phone, tablet, and Chromebook. Furthermore, Arduino will be providing better integration between the Science Journal and existing Arduino products and education programs.
Stay tuned for Arduino’s version of the Science Journal, coming to iOS and Android in September 2020!
We’ve seen a lot of practical machines built using Lego. Why not? The bricks are cheap and plentiful, so if they can get the job done, who cares if they look like a child’s toy? Apparently, not [Yuksel Temiz]. He’s an engineer for IBM whose job involves taking pictures of microscopic fluidic circuits. When he wasn’t satisfied with the high-power $10,000 microscopes he had, he built his own. Using Lego. How are the pictures? Good enough to appear in many scientific journals.
Clearly, the microscope doesn’t just contain Lego, but it still came in at under $300. According to an interview from Futurism, the target devices are reflective which makes photographing them straight-on difficult. After experimenting with cameras on tripods, [Yuksel] decided he could build his own specialized device. You can see a video of the devices in question and some of the photographs below.
According to the same interview, it took several prototypes to get it right. The first prototype didn’t use Lego but was 3D printed. However, in a quest to make the microscope more modular and configurable, [Yuksel] raided the toy box.
The open source microscope is fully motorized, modular, and uses a Raspberry Pi with an 8-megapixel camera to capture images. An Arduino controls stepper motors and the lighting. The second video, below, shows the construction, and you can find documentation on IBM’s GitHub repository.
This year, Maker Faire Shenzhen 2019 will be focusing on the theme “To the Heart of Community, To the Cluster of Industry”. With a full chain events for technological innovations, you can look forward to the Maker Summit Forum, Maker Booths (includes highlights and performances), as well as Innovation workshops. […]
As described in this project’s write-up, “The brachistochrone curve is a classic physics problem, that derives the fastest path between two points A and B which are at different elevations.” In other words, if you have a ramp leading down to another point, what’s the quickest route?
Intuitively—and incorrectly—you might think this is a straight line, and while you could work out the solution mathematically, this rig releases three marbles at a time, letting them cruise down to the Arduino Uno-based timing mechanism to see which path is fastest.
The ramps are made out of laser-cut acrylic, and the marbles each strike a microswitch to indicate they’ve finished the race. The build looks like a great way to cement a classic physics problem in students’ minds, and learn even more while constructing the contraption!
Fluoride can be healthy in certain concentrations, but above a certain level it instead has the opposite effect, causing serious dental and bone diseases. While the cost and benefit of any substance use has to be carefully weighted, up until now, verification that water source isn’t contaminated—above just 2 ppm—has been the purview of well-equipped laboratories.
The prototype device used with SION-105 to detect fluoride anions in drinking water (Photo: Marie-Thé and Etienne Roux)
Researchers at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland, however, have come up with a technique that can accurately determine fluoride concentrations using only a few drops of water. The key to this development is a new compound known as SION-105, which is normally luminescent, but darkens when it encounters fluoride. This means that instead of more expensive laboratory equipment, UV LEDs can be used with a photodiode to quantitatively measure the substance’s appearance, and thus the quantity of fluoride in drinking water.
A photograph of SION-105 suspended in solvents with (L) and without (R) fluoride ion contamination. (Photo: Mish Ebrahim)
From the images in EPFL’s write-up, the prototype test apparatus appears to utilize several commonly available components, including an Arduino Uno and small OLED display for user feedback.
Published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS), the device is named SION-105, is portable, considerably cheaper than current methods, and can be used on-site by virtually anyone.
The key to the device is the design of a novel material that the scientists synthesized (and after which the device is named). The material belongs to the family of “metal-organic frameworks” (MOFs), compounds made up of a metal ion (or a cluster of metal ions) connected to organic ligands, thus forming one-, two-, or three-dimensional structures. Because of their structural versatility, MOFs can be used in an ever-growing list of applications, e.g. separating petrochemicals, detoxing water, and getting hydrogen or even gold out of it.
SION-105 is luminescent by default, but darkens when it encounters fluoride ions. “Add a few droplets of water and by monitoring the color change of the MOF one can say whether it is safe to drink the water or not,” explains Mish Ebrahim, the paper’s first author. “This can now be done on-site, without any chemical expertise.”
Planet Arduino is, or at the moment is wishing to become, an aggregation of public weblogs from around the world written by people who develop, play, think on Arduino platform and his son. The opinions expressed in those weblogs and hence this aggregation are those of the original authors. Entries on this page are owned by their authors. We do not edit, endorse or vouch for the contents of individual posts. For more information about Arduino please visit www.arduino.cc
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