Planet Arduino

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.

Since very early on I developed an interest in education. During my studies I worked as afterschool teacher in math, physics, chemistry, and languages. Shortly after graduating from my MSc in Engineering I became a teacher at the School of Arts and Communication at Malmo University, Sweden. For over a decade I worked in the creation of education programmes for the university, looking at how to introduce technology transversely as part of several subjects within undergraduate, graduate, and postgraduate education.

Back in 2012, I realised at the time that almost no one was addressing the needs of educators when introducing curriculum. Therefore, I decided that we had to put educators at the center of our concept and help them find creative ways to use technology in the classroom. 

As we now are approaching 2020 I am very proud of where this has taken us. 

We have managed to bring Arduino Education programs into the classrooms in a large number of countries with great success, and not least with the help from all of you — our trade partners around the world. 

We rely on you to be our faces in the market and also understand how we need to step up in our offering to make sure you are equipped to bring Arduino Education to market and give the best support to the teachers.

The Arduino Education team has been expanding the past year and we now have a strong, creative and dedicated team to make sure we deliver relevant education programs, content, training and support.

Every single day we build on our vision in wanting  to make technology accessible to everyone and put it into the hands of every student and educator.

There is still a long way to go — we are on an amazing journey and this is just the beginning. The world of technology is constantly changing and new technologies keep showing their faces. Hence why it is so very important that we work hard to make students of today aware of technology and give them confidence in working with it.

Formal education is going through a strong transformation due to the digitalization of many aspects of contemporary society. If we look at the future classroom, we see technology not just as a tool to learn about, but as a system to enhance lots of processes that currently stop us from building a better interaction between teachers, students, and their families. Technology will help us accessing knowledge in better ways right at the time we need it. Assessing the student’s learning process will be easier and more personalized. We will be able of scaling pedagogical models that schools are currently only dreaming of. It will be possible to make cross-age study groups, where students will join based on their interests. Teachers will have access to tools that will help them see at once the student’s progress and needs. Student mobility will be a matter of transferring a file between schools. 

While the future is there, a few steps ahead, we still have to walk the path. At Arduino we look forward to being your partner in reaching that future, one step at a time. 

Let us change the world by making technology accessible to everyone and put it into the hands of every student and educator.

The last couple of weeks have kept the Arduino Education team extremely busy. While some of us were presenting CTC 101 to teachers all across Italy, others were in Barcelona for the CTC 101 Faire with more than 4,000 upper secondary students showcasing the projects they created as a result of the CTC 101 2017-18 academic year.

The one thing that really amazes us at Arduino EDU is how the CTC program has scaled since its inception five years ago. Back then, we prototyped our first full-year academic program and conducted a test with 25 schools. Our first faire garnered 400 participants, about 10% the size of one of our latest events. The earliest edition of CTC ran on Arduino Uno, consisted of 20 projects, was made in black and white, and included a mascot that we commissioned to the well-known Mexican artist “Grand Chamaco.” From that experiment on, almost 18,000 students have gone through the program. CTC has been implemented by 800 schools, mainly in Spain, Sweden, Ecuador, and Mexico, while more than 1,600 teachers have had the opportunity to learn under the guidance of the Arduino EDU team both on and offline.

In 2018, CTC 101 will expand to several countries including Italy, where my partner and Arduino co-founder Massimo Banzi together with Valentina Chinnici (Arduino EDU Product Marketing) led the EDU team through a custom-made “Giro d’Italia” visiting Turin, Bologna, Roma, Bari, and Naples to hold special events and workshops to Italian high school teachers, together with CampuStore, one of our Italian partners.

In the words of Massimo, “The Arduino Education tour was created to confirm and strengthen Arduino’s efforts and attention towards Italian school. The hundreds of teachers who signed in to all the dates are a great encouragement for Arduino to continue the path towards research, innovation, and dissemination of the values of open source.”

Not only did Massimo present CTC 101 to 400 teachers in person, he also hosted a webinar for over 900 educators. In case you missed it, we have posted the webinar video to the Arduino YouTube channel. (Please note that it is in Italian.)

While Massimo was touring Italy, I travelled to Barcelona with Nerea Iriepa, CTC’s project manager, to participate in the 2018’s edition of the CTC Catalunya Faire at the renowned CosmoCaixa science museum.

The EduCaixa Foundation has been sponsoring this project for the last four years in the regions of Catalunya, Andalucía, and Valencia, with a great degree of satisfaction from both teachers and students alike. In particular, a total of 200 schools in Catalunya (one-third of all of the public schools in the region) have been sponsored by EduCaixa, providing access to the program that has helped teachers enter the world of STEAM via Arduino Education.

This year’s faire brought together nearly 500 projects from 100 schools. It is worth mentioning how much effort all of the participants put in building their projects. It has been a tremendous journey for students and teachers that kicked off in September 2017 and culminated at this exhibition.

We are truly grateful for CESIRE (big hugs to Rossana and Jordi for their work), the regional ministry of education, as well as Ultralab, our local partner, in organizing this faire.