I am teaching informatics at a High school in Rome (Italy). We recently built our first multi-disciplinary lab with the aim to spread science, electronics and informatics with a focus on nature and green energy. Besides the objective of spreading knowledge on science, we want to teach students how technology could be used to improve our relationship with nature.
We have microscopes, space to grow plants, a 3d printer, laptops, sensors, and electrical components and instruments (oscilloscope, RFID tags and a reader, power supply, multimeter, arduinos and so on).
I would like to add new teaching material (and projects) to our current program and maybe you could help me find new ideas?
Personally, I am familiar with electrical and computer engineering, but I have never really used a 3D printer in a lab setting. It would be nice to start with a project that would involve a 3D printer. For example: design and print a plant pot with some smart electronic in it that sends reminders to the user about watering, humidity status and so on. Could it be a good, green and feasible idea? What would I need to do that?
Do you have suggestions on an open science project already available that I can try to recreate over here (Meanwhile I will do me own research on the site )?
You can model the 3D model using tinkercad as a beginner and print it. For sensing, you can use capacitive soil moisture sensor to measure soil moisture and or DHT11/DHT22 to check temperatures and humidity. You may use Esp32 board to send the data to the Thingspeak platform for Data visualization on a dashboard and you can configure to receive alerts as well on mobile.
Here’s our list of projects, which we call ventures, if you are looking for something to contribute to.
Building an interface means establishing some mechanisms for information exchange, flows of resources, people, designs, … See more here.
This type of interaction is stronger than the usual informal relations throughout the open source development / makerspaces ecosystem. For example, we can all document our contributions to a project and log them into a network resource planning tool, which will allow us to share the fruit of our collaboration. We could also apply for funding together, collaborate on crowdfunding campaigns, etc. It means building stronger relations to increase our creative and economic capacity, to act as a network of networks, an open value network.
Here are two interesting projects that I think match your setup and can interest students
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