Digital Cities & Citizens

IoT-start at the Hedda Andersson Gymnasium

Caroline Wendt
September 21, 2021

One ambition of the project Smarta Offentliga Miljöer (Smart public environments) was to teach high school students about sensors and IoT. Now, the teacher Ulf Jonsson and his technology students from the Hedda Andersson High School will work with a sensor project. Their sensors will soon provide them with data about the air, temperature and more. And hopefully, some students interest is sparked to develop the next generations technology and services in the process.

IoT is a topic that many high schools are interested in. Several schools from Lund and Malmö participated in the SOM-project (Smarta Offentliga Miljöer/ Smart public environments) and developped teaching materials. Axel Månsson, teacher at the Pauli High School in Malmö, already does experiments with IoT. The Hedda Andersson High School in Lund followed his lead now in April. Ulf Jonsson teaches technolgy and mathematics and will now have around 30 students from the 3rd year learning about IoT from him.

– Students from the technology-specialisation course will get to test working with IoT in twelve to thirteen lessons. This technology fits in very well, partly because it’s a topic that many find cool and that is close to the mobile phone, partly because Lund has a tradition in working with mobile communication, says Ulf Jonsson.

The Hedda Andersson High School acquired ten sensors from three to four different models. These sensors measure the air pressure, temperature, light or whether a door stands open. In the beginning of the course, the students can choose which sensor they would like to work with and what they want to do with the generated data. It could be about measuring the carbon dioxide levels in the class room or Lund’s temperatures to compare them with SMHIs weather forecast and see how well the prognosis fits. The students shall configure the sensors themselves and get them to report the data to the sensor platform Yggio. There will be additional tasks on the topic of radio technology where the students measure the signal strengths and compare it with their theoretical calculations.

– It will be like one long project with many parts. Some of the students heard about IoT but nobody has worked with it. I could see that we, at Hedda Andersson High School, will have a number of sensors in our localities to research exciting things even in other topics than technology, says Ulf Jonsson.

Since there didn’t exist any written teaching material Ulf Jonsson created a compendium for his students.

– It is very detailed material but to pass the course the students only need to know the most important parts. I designed it so that those who are interested can do more if they want.

In the coming months, Ulf and his Hedda-students as well as teachers from other schools will test the teaching material. He is hoping that other interested schools can also use the material in future.

The Lund company Sensative is behind the platform Yggio, which collects the data reports from the student’s experiments. Sensative has also helped the teachers with creating their teaching material. This way, schools obtained access to new material and contact with experts. In return, the contact with schools is also beneficial for the tech company.  

– One advantage of working with young ones is that we teach the new generation the technology behind IoT, says Peter Bårmann from Sensative. It is them who will develop the next generations technology and services. Some of the young will maybe work with us at Sensative, others maybe with our competitors. It actually doesn’t matter where they end up, because everybody who continues with this will be part of it and drive the development forward. We at Sensative, don’t provide services ourselves but we have a platform that is there to facilitate the development of services. Some of the students will maybe develop these services, others can develop sensors to connect with the platform.

The school’s subproject on IoT is part of the project Smarta Offentliga Miljöer (SOM /Smart public environments). SOM is part of the strategic innovation programme for the Internet of Things, IoT Sweden, which is financed by Vinnova. The project started September 1st 2017 and ended in 2020.

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