Estudo de termodinâmica por uma estação meteorológica experimental em arduino

Abstract

This work proposes to teach Thermodynamics concepts using a low-cost experimental weather station. The meteorological station is an educational product that was applied to the high school students at Colégio Estadual Luís Perillo, Goiânia-GO, Brazil. All the sensors were assembled on the Arduino platform. In the lab classes, the students built the system for the data collection. The station is able to collect the following data: temperature, atmospheric pressure, relative humidity, rainfall, UVA, and UVB indexes. The data, stored in the internal memory of the station, were made available on the Internet, and the students could visualize them with their smartphones. At a given moment, the collected data were analyzed in the Physics class, and served as the facilitator of a meaningful learning for some thermal physics concepts, such as: temperature, heat, thermometric scales, thermometers, relative humidity, heat transmission and UV radiation. Besides the concepts of Physics, it was also possible to teach some concepts of programming languages and basic electronics. The contextualization of physical concepts in weather forecasts, in addition to the fact that students actively collaborated to the building of the weather station, made Physics classes very attractive. It was possible to verify a very high students’ motivation through all the process steps of the Physics learning, mainly during the lab classes.