Project Ideas Needed: Environmental Science with Arduino or Raspberry Pi

Question

I'm looking for ideas/projects we can design using an Arduino or Raspberry Pi with high school students. My students are participating in Make/Google's Summer Maker Camp and they just sent us a couple of Arduino Unos to build our projects around. Since I'm really new to single-board computers, I'd love to hear from everyone here for ideas..

It would be awesome if we could find projects related to:

Environmental Science (like the one mentioned in this post)
Oceanography
Animal Health

We just ordered a couple copies of this book about Environmental Sensing and Ardiuno from MakerShed.com.

We think these devices would be great for sensing things in the environment (such as temperature, pressure, water quality, etc.), but we are also looking for ways to output that data.

If anyone has links, suggestions or even just wants to brainstorm ideas for how an Arduino or Raspberry Pi might be used at an aquarium (I work at Shedd Aquarium in Chicago), then let me know!

Re: Ideas for using the Raspberry Pi in the classroom

mikedavis · Answer

Hey Wade. I am Mike Davis, and I work with the City Colleges of Chicago. I think you guys have a golden opportunity to do some fun things. One thing I'd recommend is making use of gspread. It is something that collects information from a sensor and throws it right into a Google Spreadsheet. I've been using a Raspberry Pi and a temperature probe for some simple cooling curves. I think it is perfect for the kind of thing where you can track things like temperature, pressure, CO2, etc over long periods of time. The next step would be to make a GUI for it, and maybe a dashboard. This site is a good guide, but you will have to modify some things. I will be posting instructions soon. Using sensors you might be able to capture something with your phosphorescent fish. A Cadmium selenide sensor can be used to detect light. I think there would be something really interesting there. Here is something with a boat. http://www.raspberrypi.org/fish-pi/ You could probably do something with a waterproof camera and a sensor. Every time something touches it, it would tweet a photo.

Project Ideas Needed: Environmental Science with Arduino or Raspberry Pi

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