Montreal, Quebec, Canada
June 22-25, 2025
Conference Website
The Annual Conference is the single largest gathering of the year for ASEE members. Attendees share their individual and collective work in engineering education through formal sessions and informal meetings. This year’s theme is “Engineering Educators Bringing the World Together.”
Tuesday, June 24
Embodied Sensors and Digital Twins as an Introduction to Microprocessor Programming for Middle and High School Non-CS Majors
Leslie Bondaryk, Aaron Kyle (Duke University), Ido Davidesco (University of Connecticut), Chad Dorsey, and Bianca Montrosse-Moorhead (University of Connecticut)
1:30 – 3:00 PM, 515B, Palais des congres de Montreal
Low-cost, accessible microelectronics and sensors embedded in a bioengineering curriculum are ideal for generating engineering interest and computational thinking proficiency in non-engineering high school courses and middle school electives. This kind of curriculum provides relatable, empathetic, real-world engineering challenges that engage non-engineering- focused and marginalized student communities.
This paper describes recent curriculum and instrumentation updates to two curriculum units: (1) a novel bioengineering high school unit that challenges students to solve robotics control problems using electromyography sensor technology, an Arduino kit, and a collaborative dataflow programming language and (2) a middle school Internet of Things engineering unit that engages students with microcontroller sensor-based problem-solving scenarios. In the high school unit, students design a robotic gripper that opens and closes based on their own muscles’ electrical activity. This model of a bionic arm integrates life science content, computational thinking skills, and engineering design. Students are scaffolded through stakeholder analysis, biological electrophysiology, microprocessor instrumentation, and programming concepts required to solve control and feedback problems. In the middle school unit, students design a feedback and control system using micro:bits, sensors, fans, heat lamps, and humidifiers to maintain ideal temperature and humidity conditions in a terrarium environment.
In these units, students are motivated to solve computational thinking challenges based on achieving simulated or hands-on goals. In both curricula, students have the opportunity to create and test logic with programmable simulations—digital twins—of the hardware kits to evaluate the utility of twins in separating debugging concerns of algorithms vs. hardware. Specialty programming blocks help students deal with complex feedback issues beyond the scope of non-major students, such as hardware response time and proportional-integral-derivative control.
The classroom experience revealed gains in students’ self-efficacy in engineering design and improvements in ability to recognize key components of feedback-control systems. Class tests also revealed challenges associated with scaffolding both students and teachers at these grade levels and levels of experience or interest in computational subjects. Students struggled with algorithmic design in particular, which made it harder for them to complete the capstone projects in the curricula. There were also lessons learned about robust design and instrumentation of physical devices in classes that might only use them for a short period of time, posing hurdles for both students and teachers. Software affordances developed for programming and analyzing data from the devices and the observable moments of computational struggle are discussed.