Day 10 - WK 2

Today we were working on developing a fun and interactive lesson plan to help engage the students and encourage and get them excited to collect data understand how to look at data.  
I had the idea to have students take rc cars outside equip them with GPS sensors and have students drive a mock city setup to complete a set of tasks. To incorporate this with my Physics course I want to have the students first complete the activity using measurements by hand and vector addition and look at distance and displacement, then have them go back and create GPS data of their tasks and look at the data gathered on the GPS through numerical and GIS files and calculate their carbon emissions on the trip. I want students to then go back and look to see if there was a way to reduce their trip, and their emissions.  

The project part will be for the teams to collect GPS data for 2-5 days and compile it into one file possibly using GPSbabel.  I spoke with Jason and he is going to help us develop a code to turn the files into XML files that can then be uploaded by multiple team members and overlay each person's track in a different color to visualize and compare their routes to create a model and presentation about ways to calculate and create rideshare opportunities within their school, or community, or for some students see if they can find a better more effective bus route.
The next step for me is to research different cities maps to determine what cities might work best to scale up and recreate its basic highway system.  Also look at different rc cars and costs and GPS costs to implement this in my classes.  I need to run more tests with the rc vehicle to determine how accurate and to what extent we can collect data with few errors.  I actually saw a sight where students used GPS to write their names once the data was uploaded into the GIS application.