Student-created water quality sensors

Abstract

This paper describes efforts to enrich STEM education by providing classroom projects in which high school students build and deploy sensors for environmental monitoring. Through a series of educational modules, students learn about engineering and science through the design, construction, programming and testing of a student-implemented water monitoring network in the Hudson and St. Lawrence River regions in New York State. This paper provides an overview of the educational modules. A variety of sensors are described, which are suitably simple for design and construction from first principles by high school students while being accurate enough for students to make meaningful environmental measurements. The paper also describes how the sensor building activities can be tied to core curricula, enabling the modules to be utilized in standard classes by mathematics science and engineering teachers without disrupting the semester teaching goals and presents the results of the first year of the NS-funded SENSE IT project, during which 35 teachers were equipped, trained on these materials, and implemented the modules with over 800 middle and high school students. © 2011 American Society for Engineering Education.