Student enabled water quality sensors

Abstract

This paper describes efforts to enrich STEM education by providing classroom projects in which high school students build and deploy sensors for environmental monitoring. Through a series of educational modules, students learn about engineering and science through the design, construction, programming and testing of a student-implemented water monitoring network in the Hudson and St. Lawrence River regions in New York State. This paper provides an overview of the educational modules. A variety of sensors are described, which are suitably simple for design and construction from first principles by high school students while being accurate enough for students to make meaningful environmental measurements. The paper also describes how the sensor building activities can be tied to core curricula, enabling the modules to be utilized in standard classes by mathematics, science and computing teachers without disrupting the semester teaching goals. Furthermore, the paper presents the results of the first two years of the NSF SENSE IT project, during which 37 teachers have been equipped, trained on these materials, and have implement the modules with approximately 500 high school students.