Raspberry Pi is a miniature computer that her students plan to configure into a weather station. (Photo by Adela Crandell Durkee/for Chronicle Media)

If all goes as planned, Bethany Combs’s fourth- and fifth-grade students will have their Raspberry Pi ready for the holidays.

Combs teaches the “gifted and talented” curriculum at Glacier Ridge Elementary School in District 47. She is also the Extended Curriculum Facilitator. Raspberry Pi is a miniature computer that her students plan to configure into a weather station.

“I’m excited because it allows kids to use coding in a different format than gaming,” said Combs.

The kids will be able to apply what they learn in the project to other science and geography projects.

The Raspberry Pi School Weather Station Project has three main phases: Collection, display, and interpretation.

During the collection phase, the students learn about interfacing with sensors, understanding how they work and writing Python computer code to talk to them. They record measurements into a database and set up the weather station outside. The sensors collect data such as rainfall, wind speed, wind gust speed, wind direction, ambient temperature, soil temperature, barometric pressure, relative humidity, air quality, and time.

During the display phase, students create a website to display the measurements collected by their weather station. They upload the measurements to an Oracle cloud database to share with other schools in the project. They also help produce integrated weather maps.

During the interpretation phase students discern patterns in weather data, analyze them, and use them to make informed weather predictions for future weather both locally and nationally.

Combs learned about the Raspberry Pi School Weather Station Project through a Google+ community. District 47 is a participant in the Google Apps for Education (GAFE.) GAFE gives teachers like Combs access to different educational communities. Raspberry Pi has its own Google community.

Combs and her students must also determine where the Raspberry Pi weather station will be housed at Glacier Ridge. It will most likely be mounted permanently on the roof, however, Combs points out, there are logistical considerations involved in the project, like how to bring electrical power to the source and how to download the date to the website they plan to create.

The project is funded by Oracle and built by the Raspberry Pi Foundation, a registered educational charity based in the United Kingdom. In creating the weather station, the foundation’s goal is to provide schools with an opportunity to gather and access weather data from around the globe. The Raspberry Pi Weather Station began in the United Kingdom. Over 1,000 schools around the world participate in the project.

Any 10- or 11-year-old at Glacier Ridge can participate in the project because the Extended Curriculum club meets before the first bell rings.  They will meet either at 8:10 a.m. or 8:15 a.m. depending on how much time a particular task starts.

As the holiday celebrations get into full swing, along with “visions of sugar plums” and flying reindeer, Glacier students will be dreaming of Raspberry Pi and the impact global weather patterns have on their holidays.

–Glacier Ridge fifth-graders track weather with Raspberry Pi–