Universal Arduino-based experimenting system to support teaching of natural sciences

TL;DR

This paper presents a universal Arduino-based system designed to enhance teaching of natural sciences by enabling hands-on experiments and understanding of modern electronic devices, supported by open source resources.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel Arduino-based experimenting system with an educational concept, open source hardware/software, and tutorial support for science education.

Findings

System supports fundamental principles of modern devices

Open source hardware/software available for educators

Includes video tutorials for practical use

Abstract

The rapid evolution of intelligent electronic devices makes information technology, computer science and electronics strongly related to the teaching of natural sciences. Today almost everybody has a smart phone that can convert light, temperature, movement, sound to numbers, therefore all these can be processed, analysed, displayed, stored, shared by software applications. The fundamental question is how education can follow this knowledge and how can education take its advantages. Components and methods of modern technology are available for education also, teachers and students can play with parts and tools which were previously used only by engineers. A good example is the very popular Arduino board which is practically an industrial microcontroller whose pins are wired to easy-to-use connectors on a printed circuit board. In this paper we show a universal system which we have developed for the Arduino platform to support experimenting and understanding of the most fundamental principles of the operation of modern devices. We show our related educational concept and discuss the most important features of the system. Open source hardware and software are available and we provide a number of video tutorials as well.