Kids now have a wonderful opportunity of learning about their world while at the same time enhancing their programming skills. The Raspberry Pi Foundation is teaming up with Oracle to create an initiative – The Oracle Academy Raspberry Pi Weather Station. The initiative is inviting schools to teach their kids programming skills by applying for a weather station hardware kit that children can build and develop.
With the firm’s philanthropic arm, Oracle Giving, funding the first thousand kits, schools can get the kits without incurring any expenditure – until the stocks last. Students have the freedom to decide how to build their application. They will be using elements that SQL developed in collaboration with Oracle, while the data collected will be hosted on clouds belonging to Oracle.
The scheme is targeted at children between the ages of 11 and 16. Apart from honing their crafting skills for building the weather station, schoolchildren will also learn to write code for tracking wind speed, direction, humidity, pressure and temperature. In addition, students are also encouraged to build a website for displaying their local weather conditions. Children participating in the scheme can connect with other participants via a specially built website that doubles up to provide technical support.
According to Jane Richardson, director at the Oracle Academy EMEA, the scheme can lead to gratifying and effective careers for children as they learn computer science skills, database management and application programming. The goal of the project is twofold. Primarily, it shows children that computer science can help them in measuring, interrogating and understanding the world in a better way. Secondly, the project provides them with a hands-on opportunity to develop these skills.
The weather station is built with the Raspberry Pi or RBPi SBC as its control station. The complete set of sensor measurements the weather station handles includes Air quality, relative humidity, barometric pressure, soil temperature, ambient temperature, wind direction, wind gust speed, wind speed and rainfall. All this is measured and logged in real time with a real-time clock. Although this combination helps to keep the cost of the kit under control, users are free to augment the features further on their own.
Kids go through the scheme via three main phases of learning – collection, display and interpretation of weather parameters. In the collection phase, children learn about interfacing different sensors, understanding their methods of working and then writing code in Python for interacting with them. At the end of this phase, kids record their measurements in a MySQL database hosted on the RBPi. For this, students can deploy their weather station in an outdoor location on the grounds of their school.
In the display phase, kids learn to create an Apache, PHP 5 and JavaScript website for displaying the measurements they have collected from their weather station. They can upload their measurements to the Oracle cloud database, so that could be used by other schools as well.
In the interpretation of weather phase, children learn to discern patterns in weather data, analyze them and use that to predict future weather. For this, they can use both the local data they have collected and national weather from the online Oracle cloud database.
