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Introducing Middle School Students to Programmable Sensor Technologies Through an Immersive Experience

Integrating computational thinking into middle school science classes through the use of programmable sensor technologies requires that students are familiar with the sensors and how the sensors can help them figure out the answers to their scientific questions. However current best practice in science education integrates science content and scientific practices (i.e. planning an investigation using the sensors) instead of teaching the practices first. In addition, the goal is to have the students recognize that the sensors would be useful for answering their current questions. To address this issue, I collaboratively designed a week long sensor immersion experience with middle school science teachers as part of a larger design based implementation research project that creates middle school science units that integrate computational thinking using these sensors. Through our observations and reflections with teachers, the necessity of a unit that introduces the students to the sensors became apparent. Working with the teachers, we developed a sensor immersion experience centered around the investigation of a classroom data display that illustrates information about the classroom environment using lights and sound. The data display was constructed using the programmable sensor technologies available to the students and the unit involved them creating and refining a model of how the classroom data display worked. This unit was implemented during the first three months of the 2019/2020 school year and preliminary results suggest that students have a better sense of the capabilities of the sensors and how they can help them in their scientific inquiry.