museum of school sensors and data logging in school

School and college science experiments can use sensors to measure temperatures and other parameters that change during the experiment. For example in a biology practical, instead of watching a bubble in a tube to monitor transpiration, we could use a pressure sensor that plugged into an interface box and computer with some software to control and analyse the data. (The Roger Frost website outlines hundreds of ideas for experiments that might be so enhanced). It was Roger Frost’s ‘job’ to encourage ways that, not simply modernised science, but to find ways to improve learning outcomes.

As it happens there are benefits galore in this kind of endeavour. The thing was that back in the day (say 1998 – 2010) much of this was very hard to do: the computers were flakey, bulky and expensive. And considerable, juggling skills were needed to manage a class doing experiments like these. We didn’t have say, fitness watches that effortlessly sent data to the cloud as we have today.

Here are pictures of labs, data loggers, sensors and experiments from those times. You’ll see different solutions to fitting lots of (expensive) computers in a lab and for example, different colorimeters and different ways to measure acceleration. It’s a bit random, but luckily I (RF) often took photos back then – and here they remind how tricky it was to do data logging in a lab or classroom.