The Plant Physiology and Digital Systems, an interaction that worked!

Efforts to implement technological resources in the teaching-learning process are increasingly higher. However, most educational proposals concerning physical computing, especially for elementary to high-school, focus either on programming courses for children, robotics, or courses related to the discipline of physics. Although many articles refer to the possibilities of integrating physical computing into other disciplines such as biology and chemistry, or through projects integrating various disciplines, in fact, few real examples of application are found. This paper presents a methodology based on the development of projects for the implementation of physical computing related to the biology curriculum. For this, the Arduino was used - a hardware platform and free software that allows interaction between the environment and the computer through electronic components such as sensors, motors, transmitters, and receivers - and a simplified programming process using Scratch for Arduino (S4A). Various user-friendly projects of high technological, environmental and social impact which have been developed by students of the 11th grade during the course of the proposal are presented here.