Tekniverse: Towards a connected future for sensors, education, and action
Sibel Deren Guler, Sheryl Sotelo, Masa Iwabuchi · Interaction Design and Children · 2022
The Internet of Things (IoT) is an innovation that is rapidly transforming industries from agriculture to medicine, enabling advances such as real-time data monitoring and remote control. However, IoT's infiltration into education has been much slower, and educational tools that embody these features are few and far between. Together with the Chugach School District in Alaska, we investigated methods to teach middle-school aged students how to use IoT to drive change in their communities and collaborate in a digital world, tied to real time environmental data. The objective of this work is to provide rural, K-12 Alaskan students and teachers with opportunities that will help build an understanding of what is happening in their local environments, increase overall scientific and climate literacy, and contribute to community resilience and connectedness. Rural Alaskan students live in some of the most vulnerable regions of the planet, regions that are highly susceptible to the impacts of climate change. In this work-in-progress paper, we first discuss the design and adaptation of Tekniverse, a hardware and software ecosystem that provides a gateway for students to code and connect hardware projects and data. We then discuss the finding of our initial study of Tekniverse as a learning tool for computational thinking, data analysis, and social responsibility in rural and remote areas with students in Alaska. Lastly, we propose future directions for this research and computational collaborative tools.