#SHOTBOT ARDUINO BUILD SOFTWARE#
#SHOTBOT ARDUINO BUILD CODE#

Ĭheck out issue 17 of Hello World to read the rest of James’s article and find out all the details about the hardware and software his students used for this passion project. Students discovered that wind data is relatively easy to get over a larger area, but the key component would be something to measure CO2.

The students started by looking at existing weather station projects - for example, there is an excellent tutorial on the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s projects site. This then evolved into a system where students could work much more at their own pace and eventually led to a point at which older students could, in effect, learn through their own projects, such as the pollution monitor. I began flipping the less difficult theory for students to do as homework, to create more programming time in class where we could resolve issues more quickly.

#SHOTBOT ARDUINO BUILD CODE#

I initially started doing this because when I set coding challenges for homework, I often had students who confessed they spent all night trying to solve it, only for me to glance at the code and notice a missing colon or indentation issue. I was able to offer students support with this project because I flip quite a lot of the theory in my class. This enables more class time to be used to answer questions, work through higher-order tasks, or do group work, and it creates more supervised coding time. Flipped learning is a teaching approach in which some direct instruction, for example reading articles or watching specific videos, is done at home. I agreed to support them during allocated programming time, and to help them reach out to other schools.Ĭircuit design of the CO2 sensor using just Raspberry Pi, designed on circuito.io They had had some experience of using Raspberry Pi computers, and knew that it was possible to use them to make weather stations, and that the latest versions had wireless LAN capability that they could use. Three of my students approached me with the idea of tracking CO2 to give schools a better idea of when there was pollution and which way it was going. This project was much more than this: it was a genuine passion project in every sense of the word. This project was a genuine passion project in every sense of the word. The other benefit is that it is something to talk about in university essays and interviews, especially as they often need to do extensive research to solve the problems central to their projects. I’ve always encouraged my students to do their own projects, because it gives programming tasks meaning and creates something that they can be genuinely proud of. We also realised that if we had measurements from around the city, we might have some visibility as to when pollution was likely to affect our school. My Year 12 students (aged 16–17) followed the news and weather forecasts intently, and we all started to see how the winds from Singapore and Sumatra were sending pollution to us in Kuala Lumpur. The air pollution from a forest fire gets dispersed by winds and can spread way beyond the area of the fire.

Shotbot arduino build