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Advisor(s)
Abstract(s)
Currently, due to the widespread use of computers and the internet, students are trading libraries for
the World Wide Web and laboratories with simulation programs. In most courses, simulators are made
available to students and can be used to proof theoretical results or to test a developing
hardware/product.
Although this is an interesting solution: low cost, easy and fast way to perform some courses work, it
has indeed major disadvantages. As everything is currently being done with/in a computer, the
students are loosing the “feel” of the real values of the magnitudes.
For instance in engineering studies, and mainly in the first years, students need to learn electronics,
algorithmic, mathematics and physics. All of these areas can use numerical analysis software,
simulation software or spreadsheets and in the majority of the cases data used is either simulated or
random numbers, but real data could be used instead. For example, if a course uses numerical
analysis software and needs a dataset, the students can learn to manipulate arrays. Also, when using
the spreadsheets to build graphics, instead of using a random table, students could use a real dataset
based, for instance, in the room temperature and its variation across the day.
In this work we present a framework which uses a simple interface allowing it to be used by different
courses where the computers are the teaching/learning process in order to give a more realistic
feeling to students by using real data.
A framework is proposed based on a set of low cost sensors for different physical magnitudes, e.g.
temperature, light, wind speed, which are connected to a central server, that the students have access
with an Ethernet protocol or are connected directly to the student computer/laptop. These sensors use
the communication ports available such as: serial ports, parallel ports, Ethernet or Universal Serial
Bus (USB).
Since a central server is used, the students are encouraged to use sensor values results in their
different courses and consequently in different types of software such as: numerical analysis tools,
spreadsheets or simply inside any programming language when a dataset is needed. In order to do
this, small pieces of hardware were developed containing at least one sensor using different types of
computer communication.
As long as the sensors are attached in a server connected to the internet, these tools can also be
shared between different schools. This allows sensors that aren't available in a determined school to
be used by getting the values from other places that are sharing them.
Another remark is that students in the more advanced years and (theoretically) more know how, can
use the courses that have some affinities with electronic development to build new sensor pieces and
expand the framework further.
The final solution provided is very interesting, low cost, simple to develop, allowing flexibility of
resources by using the same materials in several courses bringing real world data into the students
computer works.
Description
Keywords
Sensor networks Teaching tools
Citation
N. Dias, D. Campos, A. Dias, H. Ferreira (2011) A framework for using real data with distributed low cost sensors, ICERI2011 Proceedings, pp. 1438-1444