Design Your Own Pedometer!

Allow students to put on their biomedical and computer engineer hats to help solve a real-world problem: obesity within the middle school community. Students use the engineering design process to design, create, and test a pedometer that keeps track of the number of steps a person takes. Students also explore the relationship between wearable technologies and overarching health conditions, specifically obesity, through various health-related research papers, online research and short documentaries. Students use a micro:bit processer and Microsoft Make Code to build their prototype. This maker challenge utilizes the engineering design process as it exposes students to basic coding, micro:bit processor applications and how programming and engineering can be used to solve health problems. Finally, students test the accuracy of their pedometer by conducting some simple self-experimentation to compare their step count in a day.