Arduino: From Physics to Robotics

This paper discusses how a microcontroller, like Arduino, can improve laboratory practice in Italian upper secondary school and change students' attitudes towards STEM subjects. Since 2015, we started a close and fruitful collaboration with several high school teachers in the Marche region to introduce microcontroller programming to the physics lab. Notably, the project also involved teachers of other subjects, such as computer science, and with different backgrounds, for example electronic engineering, thus showing the inherently interdisciplinary character and versatility of Arduino. Students were engaged in hands-on activities, working in small groups of four to five people, supervised by learning assistants and teachers. Arduino was used to interface with sensors, to control the experimental setup, and for data acquisition. Finally, we could also make contact with robotics, by building a simple prototype of a rover.