Using the Internet of (School) Things Website

Hello!

So, you've set up your Soil Sensor, Weather Station or RobotTug strength-o-meter, and you're ready to start exploring your data or creating experiments. We are going to take you through our Internet of (School) Things website step-by-step to help you get the most out of your kit and your data.

Step 1: Setting Up Your First Experiment

When you visit the Internet of (School) Things experiment page, you'll be able to access your saved experiments and also any other saved experiment from another school (see picture one).

If you want to set up a new experiment, click the "Create experiment" link, which will take you to the "Choose experiment" screen as seen in picture two. Click on the icon for the relevant bit of kit.

The next screen will ask you to select your device type and number (picture three). When you've selected you device, you need to pick one of the sensors from the device to form the basis of your data exploration or experiment. You'll be able to add other sensors to your experiment view after this step so don't worry if you need to feature more than sensor in your experiment! Click "Next".

Finally, add in information about your experiment: the name (don't make it too vague or too long), the description and the email address it will be saved under - if you're signed in, this will pre-populate. Click finish.

Step 2: Modifying Your Experiment

Nice one - you've created a basic experiment! From here you can add in live sensors in order to compare one sensor to another (even a sensor from another device), you can add in archived data (such as extreme weather events or past experiments) to compare against live data, you can use the sliders to expand and contract the time range you're looking at, and you can add in annotations to help you find key data points easily. We've annotated some of key features in the picture above.

Additionally, when you're adding in new data sets, you can choose to make them appear on an axis that is scaled to the minimum and maximum data values for your chosen time to help you investigate the patterns in your data.

Finally, save your experiment so you can come back to it and see how it has progressed.