Exploring the Outdoors with Technology

What tools and technology, available to me right now for free, could help my children learn about the world?

Animal Cams

I would love to make our own animal cam. During the pandemic, we set up everyone’s Chromebooks and laptops to simulate a zoo trip, navigating each device to one of these live animal cams. But what about setting up our own camera in a birdhouse or salt lick? This Youtuber made a tutorial about how to create your own animal cam. Raspberry pis are available at Wright Memorial Library. If they do not have the features required for the tutorial, everything wouldn’t cost more than forty dollars.

Aullwood Learning Center

I recently got a pass from the library (and one for my friend) to visit Aullwood Learning Center. In the past, my preschoolers enjoyed pretending to run the farm. We pretended to wake up and do farm chores. They loved it, and you know what I say about mature socio-dramatic play. This most recent visit, we went to the Learning Center, which had a lot of hands-on exhibits about the natural world. I think next time I will try spending hours and hours there. Enough time for the children to feel like they have sampled everything and have an overview of what is there. Then they might feel comfortable doing a deep dive into a few activities. I think when groups of children are in a museum setting it’s hard to think deeply about any one topic. A solution I’d like to try is having more time. I think behavior systems would need to be in place so the museum curators are not fearing for their turtles. It would likely help to have older students along to engage with students about the activity while adults manage uninterested students.

Geocaching

To foster rigorous latitude and longitude understanding, I would love to run a geocaching activity using these devices from the Wright Patterson Air Force Base’s STEM education auxiliary called Wizards of Wright. The Wizards can come present a lesson to your class, or they can deliver technology to your school, like this class set of GPS devices.

Rock Tumbler

Also from Wow on Wheels. This takes a few weeks, and is fussy, but is so fun to see rough, ordinary rocks turned into smooth, beautiful ones. Also children watch erosion happen.

Screen Sieves

This is a stack of mesh collanders, going from rough to fine. You put a soil sample in the top and wait for all the soil parts to trickle down. Soils from different areas have different amounts of each component, clay, silt and sand.

Microscopes

Once in elementary school I looked at some pond water under a microscope. It was fascinating.
This activity has the added benefit of making children not want to play in pond water.

In addition to microorganisms from different sites, I’d also love to look at soil components, leaves, and insect parts. I have included the photo for Wow on Wheels’ rugged student microscope, but they also have digital ones.

Wright Memorial Library has an amazing digital microscope. It has a pen-shaped lighted camera that you point at an object. Gross things make the best specimens. You can either plug it into a phone or a computer to see the output. It’s incredible.

This is one place a hotspot would come in handy.

Telescopes

If you’re going to explore the small, you should also explore the big. Of all the telescopes at Dayton libraries, the one at Wright Memorial is better. The Greene County telescope looks to the be the same brand, but I haven’t personally checked that one out. Unless we wanted to have a really early Astronomy day in the winter, or just view the daytime moon, we could look at distant trees or birds to practice viewfinding (which is no easy task). The children could read and write messages to each other yards and yards away.

Binoculars are available through Wow on Wheels, and they sometimes are more useful to amateurs than telescopes. Birdwatching becomes possible. I would love to set up birdfeeders and bird blinds. These would be fun projects for children to engineer as well.

For that one kid who loves staring directly at the sun- try SUNoculars.

Stop Motion Nature

I would be interested to see what videos children would create with this stop motion camera and outdoor materials. A dramatic scene or one-a-day plant observations, or something else entirely!

Birdsong identification

Here is an audio recording kit. I would love to use BirdNET or Merlin on recordings made in the woods. These apps use AI to identify birdsong.

iNaturalist

What if the children could identify every plant on their school grounds? This starts with the smartphone app iNaturalist. You take a picture of a plant and the app walks you through which species it could be. It’s designed for taking scientific observations about plants in a community. I could imagine groups of children making real-life contributions to the repository after much training and practice.

Air Quality

General Air Quality: a device plugs into the wall, smells the air for a while, and gives you a computer readout about the air quality. It would be interesting to plug it into a portable outlet and sample air quality from an intersection, and inside well-ventilated vs. poorly ventilated rooms.

Radon detecting: Rocks in the Dayton area (and others) outgas a radioactive element called Radon, which is harmful over a lifetime. The risk of lung cancer due to lifelong radon exposure is higher than drowning, fires, and car crashes. I would test the radon under a bin on a rocky ground, in fresh air, and in various children’s homes with and without radon mitigation systems.

Thermal Imaging Camera

These are a delight. They are available through the Wright Library and Wow on Wheels.

Vernier Probes

Wow on Wheels has this list of probes they have, and it is so extensive I am a bit overwhelmed. Each one would provide weeks of exploration. I will now reproduce it for you so you can share in the overwhelm.
Labquest2 9
LoggerPro 4
Go Link 5
Labquest2 Charging Station 2
Labquest2 Stand 4
Respiration Monitor belt 1
Hand Grip Heart Rate Monitor 4
Blood Pressure Sensor 1
Wireless Heart Rate Monitor 1
Hand Dynamometer 2
EKG sensor 1
Exercise Heart Rate Monitor 1
Spirometer 1
O2 Gas Sensor 3
O2 to Spirometer adapter 1
CO2 Gas Sensor 1
Surface Temperature Sensor 4
Motion Encoder System 1
Dual Range Force Sensor 2
Wireless Dynamics Sensor 2
Photogate 1
Ultra Pulley attachment 1
Picket Fence 1
Motion Detector 3
Go! Motion (wireless) 1
Motion Detector Clamp 1
25g Accelerometer 1
Projectile Launcher 1
Projectile Stop 1
Independence of Motion Accessory 1
Time of Flight Pad 1
Sound Level meter 2
ULI microphone 2
Magnetic Field Sensor 1
Magnetic Field Sensor 2
Gas Pressure Sensor 3
Gas Pressure Sensor 1
Conductivity probe 1
Voltage probe 1
Differential Voltage Probe 1
Current Probe 1
Thermocouple 1
Wide range Temperature probe 1
Stainless Steel Temperature Probe 7
pH Sensor 3
pH amplifier 1
Wireless pH sensor 1
Go! Temp (wireless) 1
Light sensor 1
Light sensor 1
TI Light probe 2
UVB Sensor 1
UVA Sensor 1
PAR Sensor 1
Optical DO 1
Turbidity sensor 1
Dissolved O2 Probe 1
Anemometer 1

Fairy Garden with 3Doodler

Washington Centerville Library has a handheld 3D printer pen. I am dying thinking about creating a fairy garden or buildings for a little town in the woods or prarie.

Jewelry making with natural materials

With wire and pliers, children could make beautiful things with found objects.

3D Scanner

I just reserved this because we lost a chess piece and I need to print another pawn. What if the children scanned found objects and then manipulated them and played with them on TinkerCAD?

Solar ovens and stills

I would love to help children engineer solar ovens or solar stills. They would learn about solar energy, the greenhouse effect, chemical changes, the water cycle, survival, and engineering.

Let me know if you explore with any of these!