Engaging Learners in Familiarizing Themselves with Sensors and Actuators.

During the last years, more researchers and educators have proposed workshops to familiarize learners with concepts based on smart city and smart object design. The designing process is demanding, as it requires exploring sensors and actuators which behave as activators of smart city design, but also ideate, program, and prototype new solutions to enhance smart city features. While workshops usually are based on educational boards and block-based programming environments, this paper reports on the design of in-person workshops, which are aimed at engaging high-school learners across the entire design process of smart city solutions while exploiting professional technologies and components like that of STMicroelectronics. An engagement questionnaire was administered online to understand whether participants considered the proposed workshops enjoyable and easy to follow. While learners had fun, STMicroelectronics components are perceived as slightly difficult to learn.