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The Circuit Playground Express will be turned into a thermometer indicator in the following activity. Therefore, the temperature sensor mounted permanently to the Circuit Playground Express board will be used next to the little thermometer printed near the A9 label.
The objective of this activity is to create and interpret a temperature plot. This practical application of the Circuit Playground Express board, such as placing it in a fridge, helps students understand the relevance of the lesson. By keeping the fridge door closed, then opening it for a picture, reclosing it, and finally, taking it out of the fridge and holding a heat source near it, the student can study the different cycles that they can observe, as indicated by the gradual up and down temperature trends on the plot.
This will allow you, as a teacher, to introduce fundamental concepts of a function in mathematics, such as minimum and maximum, increasing and decreasing, or concavity and convexity. The following graph shows some mathematical concepts for the Fahrenheit curve (in green); for simplicity, only one local maximum and one local minimum have been located.
The joint use of degrees Celsius and Fahrenheit will permit the introduction of function transformations, in the present case, (1) a vertical dilation (the graph stretches vertically) followed by (2) a vertical translation when switching from degree Celsius (in blue) to Fahrenheit (in green).
