Sensors Alive: Bring Physics to Life

Demystify abstract physics phenomena like light, sound, and heat as never before - with this highly innovative, gamified sensor physics lab. The core of this science kit is an app-based video game in which you use real-world sensor data that you collect from your environment to generate a diverse array of creatures.

Create, collect, play with, and take care of your creatures in the app. In a pretend bioengineering lab inside the game, kids play the role of scientists who use readings taken from three physical sensor pods outside the game. The readings are then transferred into the game via the base station. The sensor data dictates the different attributes your bioengineered creatures will have. For example, if you take a low temperature measurement, the creature generated will have long hair to keep warm. If the temperature is high, perhaps it will have scaly skin like a lizard. Or, a low light level captured by the light sensor might yield a creature with huge eyes to see better in the dark, while a high sound level reading might result in a creature with tiny ears.

Additional attributes are controlled directly by settings in the app. Combined together, all of these variables lead to a seemingly infinite number of creatures you could create. Continue to use the sensors to capture data that lets you care for your creatures, feed them, play with them, create habitats for them, and generate more creatures - all the while developing an intuitive sense of the different measurements you are taking with the sensors.

You will gain experience in measuring light levels, volumes, and temperatures with the three sensor pods, and learn about the physics behind light, sound, and heat. Learning physics comes alive as you see the tangible results of your sensor experiments. The kit contains three sensor pods, base station, app, and quick-start poster. Requires a tablet or smartphone running recent versions of iOS or Android.