A Cyber-Physical Systems Approach to Teaching Solar Weather Topics in Middle School

While K-12 student's exposure to computational concepts continues to grow, teachers seek ways to make computing topics relevant in students' everyday lives. Computer science concepts are either too general or distanced from real life scenarios. This is particularly the case in science, where complex phenomena need to be tackled with integrated approaches that include sensing, data collection, and processing. Cyber-physical systems (CPS), often encountered in engineering, are systems designed to seamlessly integrate physical components and computational algorithms. In this paper we describe the use of CPS to bridge science and computation in designing educational activities for middle-school students. The classroom activities were designed in two steps: the first, using traditional approaches focusing on modeling, summarization, and investigation, the second phase focusing on integrated system development. Using off-the-shelf components such as Arduino, the students are asked to develop a computational platform that combines sensing (such as temperature or magnetic field) with data collection and processing. Solar weather is used as the science case, due to its significant impact on the Earth. Exposing middle-school students to know how to detect the changes in environmental temperature that could help predict occurrences of solar weather events is the crux of this project.