Triple Helix

So these past few weeks I have been going to Hackett Middle School twice a week to host an after school session to get the kids acquainted with the skateboarder CSDT. It’s been going well. I’ve mainly just tried to let the kids play around on it so that they come across things they don’t understand and then I can explain things to them.

This week I wanted to try something different, however. I borrowed a group of students’ past project from Ron Eglash called the Fast Track. It’s a hot wheels track wired with an arduino and four sensors and measures the speed a car takes to finish the track (http://pdi-studio5.wp.rpi.edu/fast-track/). I put the opensource code onto my laptop and took the track to the school today. Through this project, the kids learned about speed (being equal to distance over time) and about how gravity and mass help to increase speed. It was a success as there was 100% participation and the competition really excited them. Through our talks about speed, they learned ways to increase speed without changing the track (i.e. taping weights to their cars). But this could also be a negative if the weight is too great, so they had to find that perfect balance.

A cool thing I noticed also was that we encountered other interesting aspects to explain to the students through this exercise as we ended up talking about wind resistance and extraneous data. My main goal in this project, however, was to give them a physical way to think of the skateboarder CSDT. We talked about how they could increase the mass in the CSDT as well as changing the angles of the arcs and line segments to increase gravity. So my plan was to get kids excited about the project using toys and to help them understand real world applications for the CSDT. So I can reference that next week when we go back to working with skateboarder.

Wednesday July 20th, 2011 marked the first trial run of the Culturally Situated Sensor Project*. The trial came in the form of a Workshop facilitated by Science and Technology Graduate Student Kirk Jalbert which took place at Shiprock, NM in partnership with Dine College and the Navajo Reservation. Thanks to the hard work of Kirk, the workshop was executed flawlessly and . The only problem that surfaced was on Tuesday, when a small error in the format for the date values caused issues with reading in the data to the web platform.

Just to give a brief overview of the Culturally Situated Sensor Project:

Hardware Component

Version 0.0
The system is built on an Arduino Mega and has support for temperature/humidity sensor, time and two
of the following sensors: (dust/particle, soil moisture, CO2, Carbon Monoxide, Benzene). A separate
interface device has an lcd screen and gps. The unit is used to initialize the sensors.

The system produces a csv file, which includes gps coordinates, sensor types and measurements over
a given time frame. The csv file is saved on an SD card, which can be read by any device enabled with
an SD reader.

Software Component
Version 0.0
The software is designed to allow for authenticated users to upload browse and upload an appropriate
csv file. The data is uploaded and then marked on a map according to gps coordinates, and sensor data
is plotted on a graph. A Beta demo can be seen at here.

Despite problems with software/hardware communication, we are all very happy with the results, and from all accounts, the workshop was a success. It offered an opportunity for students to experience GIS, and Participatory Sensing, at a more tangible, visceral level. We are grateful to Kirk Jalbert, Chris Shing and Mitch Sikapizye for all there hard work over the last few weeks. The results from the workshop can be seen here.

Within the next few weeks we will be conducting the 2nd and 3rd trials of the community Sensor Project, once again in partnership with the Navajo Reservation, and with a new partner in the community of Langui, which is located outside of of Cuzco, Peru. At the Navajo Reservation Kirk will be focusing on outdoor air quality (VOC, CO), as well as soil moisture. I will be traveling to Langui to work on indoor air quality, concentrating specifically on smoke emitted by indoor stoves (both efficient and traditional). We will be working along side Professor Montoya and her team from University Colorado Boulder.

*Name is still open for debate; other aliases: Culturally Situated Community Sensors, Community Sensors, RPI Community Sensors