The Tech Museum, San Jose, CA
October 19-20, 2018
Conference Website
The Maker Educator Convening is an annual gathering of the maker educator community. The conference offers maker educators opportunities to examine, refine, and share teaching practices for integrating hands-on, learner-driven experiences in all students’ education.
Saturday, October 20
Sensors, Data, Plants and Play: Computational Tinkering in Biology
Colin Dixon, Lisa Hardy, Sherry Hsi, Peter Sand (Manylabs)
11:15 AM – 12:15 PM
This session invites participation in a project that is designing, studying, and sharing InSPECT: Integrated Science Practices Enhanced by Computational Thinking to support agency in student learning and collaborative inquiry using DIY sensor and actuator kits.
DIY sensors and open source tool can make science more engaging, hands-on, and accessible. Aligned with NGSS and computational thinking frameworks, Concord Consortium’s InSPECT lab with Dataflow help support students in making experiments and creating data-rich investigations.
The session will share a slide presentation of labs that students have conducted with InSPECT, give a demo of Dataflow software and sensors, and results from recent testing with students in Oakland. We will also share our perspectives on computational participation and computational thinking, and what kinds of data and inquiry skills should be part of a student’s repertoire of practice to empower them to understand data and phenomena in the world.