This activity would be a great start to a unit on weather.  Ideally, students should create their weather instruments and use them to gather data over a period of at least several days, looking for trends in the weather such as temperature and cloud cover.  Show the weather PowerPoint to introduce weather tools and terms.  Divide students into teams of 3 or 4 to create one of the tools.  The following day, students should use the weather tool they create to take and record measurements using the “Weather Data Sheet."  Repeat this process several times over several days (or even weeks). 

Students are to research a topic and present the topic by either trying to convince you one way or another about the topic or leaving you to make your choice.

In this activity, participants plan and conduct a plant growth experiment while considering the role of data quality in automated systems in agriculture. The timing of the activity is highly dependent on the seed variety that you are growing and the level of familiarity that participants already have with basic plant science and scientific investigation concepts, but will likely take several weeks. This activity is part of the Agricultural Cyberbiosecurity Education Resource Collection that contains resources for formal and non-formal agricultural educators working with middle school aged youth. Published as Open Educational Resources, all resources are provided in durable (pdf) and customizable (MS Word) formats. They are hosted on  GoOpenVA in a unique resource collection, Ag Cybersecurity Virginia Tech, at https://goopenva.org/curated-collections/143 and on on Virginia Tech’s stable repository, VTechWorks at https://doi.org/10.21061/cyberbiosecurity

Teachers and students can learn how to put together a Microcontroller Kit with an environmental conditions sensor that measures temperature, humidity, pressure and altitude and could be used for multiple experiments and shared collectively amongst departments or schools.This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1657263. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.