For the third consecutive year (see posts for 2018 and 2017 editions) Sergi and Carlos participated in the “Practica l’UJI” programme for the promotion of computer science studies at UJI addressed to high school students.

A total of 50 high schoolers went through the workshop “Creation and programming of electronic devices”, in which we showcased the SUCRE4Kids kit. Students get also familiar with a web-based visual programing tool  to programme sensors and actuators in an Arduino UNO microcontroller using a visual programming language called Blockly. The workshop did not change much compared to previous editions. Each group of students carried out the same guided project in which they wired a soil moisture sensor and a led bar actuator to Arduino to monitor the soil humidity of a (real) plant. We only added two small variations this year. The first one is that the kit comes now with a new digital sensor: a button. The second is that all students were asked to fill in a 5-question satisfaction survey at the end of the workshop. Below their responses.

Next interventions of the SUCRE4Kids kit are in February-March and April 2019, in a high school institute (Oropesa) and in the annual science fair at UJI, respectively. For the first, the kit will be used for students to create a greenhouse as part of a 2-month biology and technology classroom project. Amazing!

The bad news are that we stop here. The good news are that we are planning a drastic redesign and implementation of the SUCRE4Kids kit to incorporate network and collaboration capabilities among other existing features. We expect to test the new design with real students in the next edition of the “Practica l’UJI”, January 2020. So, we will be working hard during this year to get an operational version of the new kit in time.

When a project ends, it is a good moment to recap the dissemination activities, interventions and scientific/popular publications derived from the current version of the SUCRE4Kit project. We used it in:

• “Practica l’UJI” programme: 2017, 2018, and 2019.
• Ingenio Game 2017, Puerto de Sagunto.
• Annual science fair at UJI, called FiraUJIciencia: 2017, 2018, and 2019.
• Project-based learning activity to create a greenhouse, IES Torre del Rei (Orpesa), forthcoming in 2019.

We published about it too:

• Popular article “Aprenent a programar de forma creativa amb SUCRE4kids” in La corriola, num 21, 2017.
• Scientific paper “SUCRE4Kids: The promotion of computational thinking through social and tangible interaction” presented at the JENUI 2018 conference. In this conference paper, we analyzed the impact of incorporating social aspects and tangible interaction in code learning sessions with students. Our observations with more than 200 students revealed that transforming the way we learn to program in a social and tangible activity can capture notably the curiosity and attention of students.
• Scientific paper “El proyecto SUCRE4Kids: Una iniciativa de hardware y software libre para la introducción a la programación” published in Novática. In contrast to the previous scientific article, the focus of this article was on the technical implementation of the SUCRE4Kit project, and on the description of each one of the sensors and actuators of the kit. We also compared our solution with other similar educational projects to learn coding in literature.

Data and code for the generation of some images of the papers above and the Likert scale plot used in this post are available at https://github.com/cgranell/practica-uji