Looking For An Amazing, Cross-Curricular, Collaborative Project?
2 min read
I learned about this from Leslie Hawthorne - there is a new project underway to help mitigate the decline of the bee population.
From the Open Source Beehives Project:
The Open Source Beehives project is a collaborative response to the threat faced by bee populations in industrialised nations around the world. The project proposes to design hives that can support bee colonies in a sustainable way, to monitor and track the health and behaviour of a colony as it develops. Each hive contains an open source sensory kit, The Smart Citizen Kit (SCK), which can transmit to an open data platform: Smartcitizen.me
These sensor enhanced hive designs are open and freely available online, the data collected from each hive is published together with geolocations allowing for a further comparison and analysis of the hives.
This can be an amazing project for a K12 school doing any kind of fabrication work, and it exposes students to an incredible array of skills. A short list, in no particular order, includes:
- Open hardware;
- Open designs - all the designs are available on github;
- Fabrication and Build - these hives don't build themselves!
- Sensors for Data Collection;
- Open Data Available from multiple hives - data collection from the hive is logged at Smartcitizen.me;
- Bees and Beekeeping;
- Urban Gardening;
- Collaboration with other schools building hives;
- Use of github and openly licensed material to create;
- etc, etc, etc.
Personally, I'd introduce it by reading "Ambrose His Mark" by John Barth, and/or "Royal Jelly" from Roald Dahl. There are certainly countless other stories that would work as well or better.
