About¶
A hands-on textbook for middle and high school students: build a Raspberry Pi station that measures temperature, pressure, and humidity, logs the data, and reports it from the field.
Audience¶
This edition is written for students in grades 6–12 working in a science classroom, an after-school STEM club, or on an independent science fair project, along with the teachers and advisors guiding them.
You need to be comfortable with decimals, ratios, and reading a line graph, and you need to be able to follow a multi-step procedure carefully. That is the whole list. No prior experience with programming, the Linux command line, or electronics is assumed — the book teaches each of those as it becomes necessary.
The grade band is wide on purpose. The main path through each chapter is written to be readable in middle school; the extension activities and the data-analysis chapters go considerably deeper for older students.
See the Course Description for the full list of prerequisites, topics, and learning outcomes.
Other Editions¶
This is one of several editions covering the same subject at different levels:
| Edition | Audience | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Grades 6–12 | Middle and high school | This book |
| Undergraduate | College-level earth and environmental science | Planned |
| Elementary | Grades K–5, focused on the history of environmental science and how to read a weather report | Planned |
How to Use This Book¶
- Read chapters in order — concepts are introduced in dependency order.
- Use the search bar (top right) to jump to a specific term.
- Try the MicroSims as you encounter them; they are the fastest way to build intuition for a new concept.
- Check the Learning Graph when you want to see how a concept fits into the larger picture.
Author¶
Hank R.