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Given the current state of in-person education, technology enabled remote learning can play a great role in keeping students’ education on track. Sensational Science Projects is an application designed to help supply a platform to develop and distribute science projects from teachers to their classes. As many teachers are encountering this remote learning challenge for the first time, this application promotes sharing of projects between teachers by allowing teachers to post their projects publicly so that other teachers can use and edit them for their own use and do not need to re-invent existing projects.

Sensational Science Projects was modeled after the concept of Citizen Science Projects, where data collection is crowd sourced. The data can be collected remotely and submitted through an online platform. Sensational Science Projects applies this concept to enable remote data collection and adds in data compilation so that students and teachers can see trends within the entire class’s data instead of just their own. It also allows teachers to create and edit projects to meet the needs of their class instead of adapting their wants to match the existing Citizen Science Project.

This application is built using Google’s Flutter framework and several open-source plugins including geolocator, image_picker and path_provider, flutter_google_maps. It is available for use on the web as well as on apple and android mobile devices. Teachers are able to create or edit existing projects which include text input, short answer response, numerical input (whole numbers only), multiple-choice questions, location data (by using the device location), and image input from a file or via the device camera. Teachers, once logged in, will have a homepage that displays all of their active classes, an ability to browse available projects and create new projects. They can set up a class with a roster and add projects to that class with a specific due date. Teachers can have multiple classes using the same account. Once a project is added to a class, the teacher can view the compiled data at any point and view a specific student’s submission.

Each student will have a unique 7-digit code generated for each project assigned to the class. With the code, the student can submit data up until the due date and view the compiled class data after the due date for submission has passed. The students will be able to access the project until the due date and data will be stored locally on mobile devices until submitted. Upon submission, the student’s answers will be transferred from being stored locally to being stored in the database. If the student chooses to edit their project before the due date, their newly submitted answers will overwrite their previous answers. Once the due date has passed, the aggregated results will be available for the students to review. 

We hope Sensational Science Projects will help K-8 teachers and students explore science together even though they are remote.