New Programming Paradigms

Abstract

Davina, a seventhgrade girl, lives in a rural community. She loves her dog, Slayer, and wonders what he does all day. Like many other dogs in her area, Slayer doesn’t spend a lot of time indoors at home; he goes on adventures during the day, and returns home many nights for food and sleep. Davina’s friends have similar curiosities: Where do their dogs go? What other dogs do they hang out with? They decide to work together to build technologies that will get them answers to these questions. With their teacher’s help, they use the BBC Micro:bit (a small, lowcost microcontroller with builtin sensors and wireless communication) to create animal wearables that they can use to create a data set about their dogs’ social and geospatial activities. They assign each dog a unique ID number and program each dog’s Micro:bit to broadcast that unique ID every 30 seconds using the builtin shortrange wireless radio. They also program each device to listen for broadcasts from other dogs’ devices; each device will count up how many times it receives broadcasts from every other device. The next time they see their dogs, they attach the Micro:bits (in waterproof cases) to the dogs’ collars, and send them out on their adventures. Then, when they see the dogs again, the students download their dogs’ data sets to their laptops. They bring these data to class, and each creates a graph of how much time their dog hangs out with every other dog.