Teaching CT through Internet of Things in High School: Possibilities and Reflections

Abstract

This Research to Practice Full Paper presents a pedagogical practice for technical high school students for developing Computational Thinking (CT) abilities through Internet of Things technologies. The covered topics in our proposal include (i) the use of temperature and humidity sensors for data collection, treatment and visualization using Arduino and micro-controllers; (ii) Smart and Human Cities (SHC) and Open Data concepts, in order to lead the students to reflect on the problems of their city and on data protection. Our motivation to our proposal is due to the educational processes have to develop criticality and the ability to solve problems among students. In this context, CT has been used for this through the use of robotics, game building or unplugged computing. On the other hand, technologies for implementing Internet of Things (IoT) have been used in several domains of society, including cities transformation. One important aspect in this scenario is data generation, which have to be carefully tackled by government’s and who develop solutions to SHC. In this way, using IoT for teaching CT is an important aspect, also considering open data, privacy and SHC context. In our pedagogical practice, students were able to design and develop solutions to problems in their daily lives indirectly applying CT skills, such as decomposition, pattern recognition, abstraction, automation and analysis, as well as self-skills, collaboration, creativity and critically, required nowadays in broad professional training. It was also possible to develop students’ interest in raising awareness of the use of computational technologies, as a solution to problems in society considering aspects of SHC and open data; propose a technological solution using IoT; and analyze the use of these data collected for the social well-being. For the evaluation of our proposal, we carried out questionnaires and tasks observation. The experience was considered successful in its planning and application, with a positive evaluation of the participating students.