Educational Strategies for Using Inexpensive Sensor Systems to Promote Scientific Reasoning and Conceptual Understanding

The Berkeley Explorations in Science Research program, hosted at the University of California Berkeley in summer 2011, was a week-long summer intensive designed to expose upper-division college students to climate change and energy-use research. Students were given access to live and historical building energy usage and CO2 data taken within the UC Berkeley campus. The program began by framing the challenges of climate and energy research, followed by a two-day tutorial giving students the basic programming and data analysis tools required to analyze these large datasets. Another day was spent familiarizing the students with a suite of meteorological, energy consumption, and carbon dioxide sensors they would use to collect additional data. A team of graduate students then aided the program participants in designing insightful projects that remained realistic with respect to available pre-existing data and the short deployment length available. The program ended with a series of student presentations discussing the discoveries the students made about CO2 concentrations and energy consumption in the campus environment.