Social Necklace Project: A student-made gadget to help people during the COVID19 pandemic

This paper presents the Y9 (9th-grade level) project from Beacon School, São Paulo - Brazil, entitled Social Necklace. The main scope was to bring for students’ maker learning, programming literacy, and computational thinking. Through hands-on activities, all students could think, experiment, create, and learn. Fundamental premises to transform them into producers instead of simple technology consumers. During classes, the STEAM and PBL (Project Based Learning) approaches were the basis, which allowed students to choose the theme COVID-19, the driving question: Can technology contribute to helping in the control and prevention of pandemics? And coding and setting a gadget using the BBC Micro:bit, as an answer to the question. The work carried out with the students enabled many dialogues between the different fields of knowledge. Through maker education, it was possible to engage students in learning activities very distinct from traditional education.