Computing

Students use the engineering design process to design, create, and test a pedometer that keeps track of the number of steps a person takes. This maker challenge exposes students to basic coding, micro:bit processor applications, and how programming and engineering can be used to solve health problem...

Students follow instructions to connect a Sunfounder Ultrasonic Sensor and an Arduino Microcontroller. Once they have them set up, students perform necessary calibrations, and practice using the sensor.

Students engineer a device to alert peers who are about to be late to class. To do this, students first define the problem and success criteria for an alert system. Students code an Arduino circuit to display a repeating/blinking message on an LCD screen with LED lights (in Tinkercad). Then they wor...

Students design and create flow charts for the MIT App Inventor tutorials in this computer science activity about program analysis. In program analysis, which is based on determining the behavior of computer programs, flow charts are an important tool for tracing control flow.

Students embark on an interactive journey through the Engineering Design Process (EDP) to develop, test, and refine a system aimed at enhancing the accuracy of a ball thrown or flicked toward a small target. This hands-on activity serves as an analogy to the process of training machine learning syst...

Students learn what goes on inside video game controllers by building their own, which shows them the use of simple circuits and switches. Inside a shoebox, they wire up a joystick and two arcade push buttons to a MaKey MaKey and a laptop by following a provided hole-cutting template and wiring sche...

In this lesson, students learn about, design and create flow charts for different scenarios, including a game based on the Battleship® created by Hasbro©. In the associated activity, Flow Charting App Inventor, students apply their knowledge from this lesson and gain experience with a software appli...

Students learn vocabulary necessary for understanding how ultrasonic waves are reflected and refracted. Students also see how ultrasound technology is used in medical devices.

Students learn how to use a Jupyter Notebook and identify the frequency, wavelength, amplitude, period, and phase of a simple sinusoidal waveform. As they learn how to label the parts and properties of the waves, they connect these characteristics of waves to various real-world wave examples such a...

Students learn about 3D printing and what considerations to make in the engineering design process to print an object with quality and to scale. Students learn the basic principles of computer-aided design (CAD) and how data points can be turned into a program that operates the 3D printer. Students ...

Students create projects that introduce them to Arduino—a small device that can be easily programmed to control and monitor a variety of external devices like LEDs and sensors. They are given three challenges—to modify an LED blinking rate until it cannot be seen, to replicate a heartbeat pattern an...

Students use Arduino microcontrollers and light-sensitive resistors (photocells) to sense the ambient light levels in a room and turn LEDs on and off based on those readings. They are challenged to personalize their basic night-lights with the use of more LEDs, if/else statements and voltage divider...

Using the Netlogo platform to run simulations of a basic neural network called the perceptron, students explore a basic, yet powerful, model of machine learning as they are challenged to understand the logic.

Students create indoor lighting fixtures that look like fluffy clouds with embedded LEDs that change color based on real-time Internet-accessed weather data. They use paper lanterns, pillow stuffing and LEDs to create the rainbow-colored “cloud” light fixtures. They program the controls to connect t...

Working as if they are engineering teams, students create safety products that kids would want to wear while playing Pokémon Go in the dark. They create electroluminescent (EL) patches that they adhere onto clothing, backpacks and more. They cut Pokémon character stencils out of iron-on cloth patche...

Students analyze their social networks using graph theory. They gather data on their own social relationships, either from Facebook interactions or the interactions they have throughout the course of a day, recording it in Microsoft Excel and using Cytoscape (a free, downloadable application) to gen...

How might engineers keep people safe during a hurricane? Students use a hurricane tracking map to measure and graph how close the eye of a hurricane is from population centers, and then analyze MATLAB computer code generated by hurricane tracking data.

Student groups use the Java programming language to implement the algorithms for optical character recognition (OCR) that they developed in the associated lesson. They use different Java classes (provided) to test and refine their algorithms. The ultimate goal is to produce computer code that recogn...

Students design a machine learning model that can predict whether a patient has diabetes. Students first learn about the diabetes epidemic and the relationship between machine learning and healthcare. They then create a simple program using machine learning that can predict whether a patient has dia...

Students download the software needed to create Arduino programs and make sure their Arduino microcontrollers work correctly. Then, they connect an LED to the Arduino and type up and upload programs to the Arduino board to 1) make the LED blink on and off and 2) make the LED fade (brighten and then ...

Students utilize Google's Colab and Google's Bard to master writing “if” statements in Python while also analyzing the effectiveness of an AI tool to define future success criteria for engineers developing tools like Bard. Engaging in various activities, students delve into the significance of condi...

Working in small groups, students complete and run functioning Python codes. They begin by determining the missing commands in a sample piece of Python code that doubles all the elements of a given input and sums the resulting values.

This unit leads students through a study of human vision and computer programming simulation. Students apply their previous knowledge of arrays and looping structures to implement a new concept of linked lists and RGB decomposition in order to solve the unit's Grand Challenge: writing a program to s...

The Milton Bradley game “Simon” is an electronic version of the game “Simon Says.” The object of the game is for a player to press the color that matches the sequence and interval presented. As the player completes the task of depressing the emitted bar, another color or sequence addendum is added, ...

Students modify a provided App Inventor code to design their own diseases. This serves as the evolution step in the software/systems design process. The activity is essentially a mini design cycle in which students are challenged to design a solution to the modification, implement and test it using ...

Students are challenged to design and program Arduino-controlled robots that behave like simple versions of the automated guided vehicles engineers design for real-world applications. Using Arduino microcontroller boards, infrared (IR) sensors, servomotors, attachable wheels and plastic containers (...

Students become detectives as they learn to extract metadata from digital images, analyze the metadata and locate when and where the images were taken. Students also learn that if they can do this, then others can too, including law enforcement and criminals.

Students learn that trigonometric functions can model how their hearts work and can provide important information about their cardiovascular condition. Students analyze their own photoplethysmogram (PPG) obtained from a fingertip pulse oximeter.

Students learn about infrared energy and how it is used to sense the surrounding environment. They review where infrared falls on the electromagnetic spectrum and learn how infrared sensors work, as well as various ways engineers and scientists create and apply infrared technology to study science a...