Original title: Design, Implementation and Functional Verification of an Educational Prototype with a Visual Programming Interface for Contextualized STEM Activities
Ronald Paucar Curasma, Roberto Florentino Unsihuay Unsihuay Tovar, Claudia Acra-Despradel, Augusto Cáceres Núñez · September 2026
Learning STEM subjects can be tough when classroom activities do not connect to real-world tasks. To fix this, researchers built an educational toolkit using open-source electronics and easy-to-use coding tools. They created three specialized circuit boards connected to sensors: an Agriculture Board to test soil moisture, an Environment Board to check air quality, and an Aquaculture Board to measure water cloudiness. The team wrote custom blocks in the visual coding program mBlock so students can snap code blocks together instead of typing text. When plugged in, the boards gather sensor data and send it directly to the screen. In classroom tests, students completed four-step projects to solve realistic problems. The tests showed the system worked as planned: the hardware stayed powered, the software communicated smoothly, and sensor readings appeared on screen in real time, proving that visual programming and custom hardware work well together in college classrooms.
Imagine baking a cake for a friend who is allergic to gluten, dairy, and eggs. You cannot just follow a normal recipe; you have to swap ingredients and hope the texture still works. The hard part is that you only find out whether the substitutions worked at the end, when it is too late to fix. In this paper, the researchers build a STEM teaching kit the same way: they assemble custom electronic boards, test each connection, and then connect the boards to a drag-and-drop programming tool so students can watch live measurements instead of discovering a broken step mid-lesson.
Students in higher education often meet STEM as abstract theory, far from the world they live in. This prototype turns soil, air, and water into live data they can see and program, using affordable open-source hardware. It shows a practical path for bringing real-world, sensor-based projects into ordinary classrooms.
The abstract reports functional verification, not a controlled study of learning outcomes. It does not compare this prototype against other teaching methods, measure whether students learned more, or assess usability, cost, or scalability. It also focuses on one specific hardware/software combination, so results may not generalize to other platforms.
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Design, Implementation and Functional Verification of an Educational Prototype with a Visual Programming Interface for Contextualized STEM Activities — Ronald Paucar Curasma, Roberto Florentino Unsihuay Unsihuay Tovar, Claudia Acra-Despradel et al. — Electronics — doi:10.3390/electronics15184329
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper.