The design and evaluation of a sensor-based mobile application for citizen inquiry science investigations

Despite their advantages of portability and ease of use, mobile devices have not yet been used in their full potential in education to measure and investigate real world phenomena. While some existing applications exploit individual sensors on mobile devices, there is no current toolkit that combines and customises data from the full range of sensors, and makes these data available for import to citizen inquiry science projects. This pa-per presents such a toolkit, called the Sense-it app, which gives access to all sensors on Android smartphones and tablets and connects to new or existing citizen science projects. We describe the design and formative evaluation of the toolkit in collaboration with students and teachers from a city technology college