Following our boots-in-the-water education philosophy, students at Milton Hershey School in Pennsylvania are collaborating with Stroud Water Research Center to deploy water-quality-monitoring sensor stations in a creek that runs through their campus. As part of the school’s Agriculture and Environmental Education pathway, the students are taking the computer science skills they learn in the classroom and applying them to real-world problems in the field.
An example of a Mayfly sensor station deployed in a stream.
The students will be deploying multiple sensor stations built with EnviroDIY’s Mayfly data logger. EnviroDIY.org in an online community for do-it-yourself environmental science and monitoring and is an initiative of the Stroud Center. We share our experiences building wireless sensor networks on EnviroDIY so that anyone can replicate and implement their own versions of our instrumentation.
This is experiential learning at its best: getting kids in the stream, getting them interacting in their environment. — Jesse Yonkovich, Agricultural and Environmental Education Academic Coordinator, Milton Hershey School
The EnviroDIY Mayfly Data Logger is a powerful, user-programmable microprocessor board that is fully compatible with the Arduino IDE software. It features the ATmega1284p processor, which is much more powerful than the 328p chip found on most other Arduino boards. It has four times more flash memory for sketches, 8 times more RAM, and almost twice as many input pins.
