At GEOTEC we are strongly committed to the communication and dissemination of science. But also to the training of those who work with kids and young people. As part of the Sucre4Stem project, supported by FECYT, we conducted a training course, promoted by CEFIRE Castellón, especially aimed at school teachers to show them the components and tangible resources of the Sucre4Stem project: Sucrekit, SucreCore and SucreCore.

During the five face-to-face sessions, we presented the history of the project, covered major technology updates, and presented SucreCode, SucreCore, and Sucrekit in detail, from the teacher’s rather than the student’s perspectives. A central part of the course was creating practical mini projects with SucreKit. A typical project is to connect sensors and actuators in a single SucreCore. More interesting, however, is to allow two or more SucreCore to communicate with each other by setting shared variables to work. Shared variables create a kind of communication channels, where one SucreCore can produce data at one end and another SucreCore can consume it at the other end. This opens the door to interesting interventions in the classroom, where groups of students can collaborate to collect measurements from sensors (producers) at different locations within the school or city, while another group acting as a consumer can read and process these measurements, for example, to compute aggregate or basic statistics which are then fed into actuators.

The course is over. We met today with the CEFIRE staff (Sergio & Leticia) to discuss the results and impressions of the course. No doubt: fluid communication and shared vision. It is very likely that we will continue to collaborate with them through a upcoming dissemination-training event next February 2022 and, of course, the second edition of the Sucre4Stem training course, promoted by CEFIRE, is already scheduled for next October 2022.