Co-Designing Inclusive Science with the Prosperity For All Nexus We invited Calum and Miles to try out an inclusive science lab design, and to help us make a video about it. So this is... it's a little board and then this is a sensor on here that... this see this pH probe has at the end - see this little bubble? and then there's some wires running up on the inside and then that measures - we talked about pH being the hydrogen so this measures the amount of hydrogen in the liquid that you put it
in so it's like 85 pH? That's right? That right, yeah yeah Right. so we want to make sure there's enough in there so That's good. it can be read by the sensor so let's, you have to shake that up a little bit ... Cal, you do the sensor, okay Oh, look! so it takes a little bit of time to read No actually it's all good Yeah so it's gone down quite quickly but it will keep changing for a little bit of time so my thing was correct. Between 4 and 2 So what you're hearing is the pH value being converte
d into a scale that is mostly based on the pitch. The lower values Right now it's in the rinse which is about a 6.34 if we move that into something really acidic like the vinegar you can hear it go down it sort of increases in volume We've got, with this one we've got sort of a polarity based scale going Where it gets kind of louder and more distorted as it goes towards the very acidic or the very base So we have the highest is drain cleaner Which one? What number? 14 Lowest? Battery acid. And w
hat's half of 14? 7 It's gone up. Oh, oh my gosh look at that. Hear how the sound changes? When will it become pure water? That's interesting I don't know It's supposed to be pure water. Let's put that in the orange juice and see what happens oh, it's going to go to orange juice. Will it go to orange juice? it's right above there, the orange juice I'm just going to rinse this off so you can hear it change So it's in the rinse now and now I'm going to switch it to something and you can take a gue
ss at what it is. It's in the rinse. That's the rinse, correct. Yes! Is it, umm, Brisk? Brisk, yeah, Brisk That is in fact what it is Yes! Yeah! I got it! Alright, so it's in something else now. What do you think it's in? Is it water? Pretty close. Milk, milk, milk! Yes, it's in milk. Alright, let's do one more. Let's see. Is it sprite? It is not in sprite. Vinegar! Yep, it's in the vinegar. Yes! Cool, you got both of those. Nice job! So, if I gave you this that represents water and rain how doe
s the cycle work? the more soil you have the more chance there will be for the soil to affect the water that we're going to pour through it what we did is we made a solution that's got about the same pH as acid rain by adding vinegar to the water until we got to about a 4 so what we wanted to do was emulate this part of the rain in the sky coming hitting the soil and filtering through and coming out the other end that is here and seeing what the change is we're going to put it in the dirt water
and see what happens ah, that's interesting. Let it sit for some time. Let it sit. so it started off the acid rain mixture that we made was vinegar and water and it was what pH level again? I don't recall It was 2. It was actually a 4. and then we ran it through the soil that has a high clay content is that right? and the liquid that came out the other end had a pH of 7.19 that's a big difference What do you think happened? The acidity, all that acid that was in that mixture we made was absorbed
by the soil and what came out at the end was at about the same pH as pure water The Nexus is an integration technology that we built for Prosperity for All that enables us to connect different things to one another. and in this case what I have here is I can show you a way we'd be using it for some sensors you might find in a science lab Our hope is to be able to use the Nexus to make learning environments like science labs more inclusive. So what we think of in an educational context for the a
pplications of this is a kind of multi modal science lab experience where you might have groups of students dealing with common sets of sensors and because the client side doesn't need to know where the sensor data is coming from, it could be sensors that were adjacent to it it could be remote sensors being streamed over the internet so you're dealing with kind of a common set of inputs and then depending on the preferences or the learning styles of any one learner they might want to see that as
a plain dashboard implementation they could reinforce that with something like a sonification like we saw with the guessing game that we played with Miles and Calum They can see visualizations like this and some of the eventual goal of the kind of work that we're doing here which is work that feeds into our open education activities in FLOE is this idea of one to one learner customization so someone will want to choose the presentation that works best for them and eventually with the tools that
we're building not only will content authors be authoring multi-modal content within these tools for consumption by learners Learners themselves will be making custom visualizations and custom sonifications and custom, you know, presentations of data that are meaningful to them that they can share and remix with other learners. and I'd like to illustrate some recent work that we've done with the sensors one of which is to do some visualizations of the state of the Nexus and then the other is to
support dynamic configuration of the Nexus as it's running. so what we have is, we have two sensors currently connected we have a pH sensor and we have a electrical conductivity sensor and this what we're seeing on the screen here, this visualization is showing the objects that are currently running inside the Nexus and what I can do is I can expand these sections of the component to see the current model value. for each of our sensors, so in this case the pH and the conductivity sensor we have
a peer inside the Nexus that the sensors send their values to, so as the sensor updates it relays the model by websockets and then that updates the peer component inside the Nexus. and then we have a component on the left here that is called the collector and that one is receiving model updates of all of the connected sensors. so this is a sort of central place where the values are collected together we have visualizations, sonifications and other presentations they can listen to this collected
model and then react to sensors to show their values to allow users to interact with them and then we have a third component here in this case called sendPhSensor and this one is relating the pH sensor peer model value onto the collector one. and these peers are constructed dynamically depending on what is connected to the Nexus so for example if I unplug the pH sensor then what we will see happening is that the peer from the pH sensor has been removed likewise if I unplug the electrical conduc
tivity sensor we see that that one has also been removed. and then if I plug them back in again then we will see the peer for the sensor being added and then the one that does the wiring the send one is also created in response to that so we have configured with the Nexus some recipes that say if this collection of peers is present then react by constructing this other component and then whenever those, that situation is not present anymore we tear down and we undo the things that we constructed
so that way whenever we have the collector and we plug in one of the sensors we have a rule that says ok if there's a collector and there's one of these types of sensors I'm going to create something that connects them together and then when that situation changes the sensor is removed then we remove the component that did the connecting so this way we can dynamically react to the addition or removal of peers from the Nexus I'm Alan Harnum. I'm a software developer at the Inclusive Design Resea
rch Centre. and I work on a whole bunch of different projects related to the FLOE project Flexible Learning for Open Education. I'm Simon Bates, I'm a software developer at the Inclusive Design Research Centre in Toronto and I'm the lead developer of the Nexus. My name's Calum. And Miles. And we like doing things! Me too! Thank you very much for all your help today guys. Thank you so much guys. Give them a round of applause. Awesome! A video by Calum Harp, Caren Watkins, Colin Clark, Miles Harp,
Simon Bates
Comments