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Google's 'Science Journal' App Turns Your Android Device Into A Laboratory (pcmag.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the DIY dept.

An anonymous reader writes about Google's latest 'Science Journal' app that was released at the end of Google I/O last week: Google has launched its 'Science Journal' app that can essentially turn your Android device into a tricorder of sorts. The app uses the sensors in your smartphone to gather, graph and visualize data. For example, you can use Google's Science Journal app to measure sound in a particular area over a particular period of time, or the movement of the device's internal accelerometers. The app is fairly basic to start, but Google is working to expand its functionality. It's even partnering with San Francisco's Exploratorium to develop external kits that can be used with the app -- which includes various microcontrollers and other sensors. As part of its Google Field Trip Days initiative, which allows students from underserved communities to attend a local museum for no cost and includes transportation and lunch, Google sent out 120,000 kits to local science museums. They also sent out 350,000 different pairs of safety glasses to schools, makerspaces, and Maker Faires worldwide, to ultimately help young students work on even bigger projects. You can download the app from the Play Store and start experimenting here.

29 comments

  1. similar summary by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    http://gizmodo.com/googles-new...

  2. Great. by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 2

    Now make some actual usable math software for modern portable devices. And make it programmable and have connectivity to such external kits.

    --
    Ezekiel 23:20
    1. Re:Great. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      glad i'm not the only one with this reaction.

      I can't wait for appy app app appz troll to show up. This whole ecosystem is just a bunch of garbage being packaged as if it's cool in any way.

      Who gives a fuck about this ? Like 3 middle school science teachers ?

    2. Re:Great. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I've read that there are 23 directly measurable physical properties (sight, smell. sound, touch, temperature, etc). You can buy sensors for most of these for a couple dollars on ebay. Almost trivial to use any of these devices.

    3. Re:Great. by thinkwaitfast · · Score: 1

      Labview is easy enough.

    4. Re:Great. by cellocgw · · Score: 1

      LabView's a massive disaster. Yeah, nice cool GUI with wires and boxes and whatnot, but no way to read code to debug; no way to know what really is inside a box,...

      The main problem with putting math software on a touchscreen device is the difficulty of entering numbers or commands accurately.

      --
      https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
    5. Re:Great. by thinkwaitfast · · Score: 1

      Being on a phone is not conducive to making anything like a large program either, but hacking out a simple program in a few minutes to monitor temperatures and send out a warning should be adequate.

    6. Re:Great. by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 1

      The main problem with putting math software on a touchscreen device is the difficulty of entering numbers or commands accurately.

      There are at least two alternatives I could come up with. For equation/formula input, or general entry of data, the presence of an camera is an enabler for specialized OCR (recognition of equations/formulas, tables, maybe even charts). In case of using the screen, something Graffiti/Teeline-like, combined with structured editing of input (as opposed to ASCII entry) - and perhaps dynamic menus (dynamic keys, really) as well - would also greatly facilitate interaction.

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    7. Re:Great. by Sir+Holo · · Score: 1

      And buy a myDAQ from sparkfun.com. It comes with a free student version of LabView (only diff. is a watermark). The myDAQ is an entry-level A/D converter, power supply, signal generator, etc. The specs are pretty sweet for the price.

      And LabView is not hard to debug if you know how to use it. It actually has lots of great debugging features like step-through, step-over, and incremental operations (hitting space to advance) so you can find the bug. Many things that people think are bugs are actually the result of the 'power-save mode' that your CPU goes into when under low load.

      Digital implementations are not like analog ones. In analog, a function might occur at exactly the same time after signal, every time. With a modern CPU, which does all sorts of load-balancing, that function will occur within a distribution of times, centered around an average response time. So... Just set your nodes so they don't execute until everything required has arrived (which is built-in), or put in a 5 ms wait-function.

  3. Sort of like... by MightyMartian · · Score: 1

    Sort of like how Slashdot now pushes "celebrity news" and super sciency de=fluoridization products on its main page.

    --
    The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
  4. pinky and the brain by turkeydance · · Score: 1

    could have used this

  5. This app is incompatible... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    with your 1 year old Android phone. Pffft!

    1. Re:This app is incompatible... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That's funny cuz my phone will be four years old next month and it's compatible with mine. Maybe you're lying.

    2. Re:This app is incompatible... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's a cheap ZTE Prelude 2, so STFU.

    3. Re:This app is incompatible... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's a cheap ZTE Prelude 2, so STFU.

      That's funny because I picked up one of these on sale at the Cricket store last year as a lowest of the low end test unit and I just installed the Science Journal app on it to see if you were right. And lo and behold, it works. Kind of cool actually. Again, why lie?

    4. Re:This app is incompatible... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      What a coincidence... Not.

  6. Typo in the title by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    "Google's 'Science Journal' App Turns Your Android Device Into A Lavatory" and that makes it even more impressive.

  7. Well yea but its google. by jimbob6 · · Score: 2
    WOW that seems like it will be supper useful to advertisers.

    Tones of mobile devices taking all kinds of readings and interpreting the data in a meaningful way.
    After all, why stop with letting Google track everywhere you go ,see and hear everything around you and log your conversations, when they can get detailed scans and biometrics to add to there database.
    I'm so glad that Google is using "field trip days" to impress on our young people just how important it is to carry a detailed omnidirectional dataloger every where they go.

    1. Re:Well yea but its google. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      They're being upfront about it though.

      When I went to download it from the Play store, the developer is listed as "Marketing @ Google."

  8. Awesome! by Opportunist · · Score: 1

    Where do I attach the Liebig condenser?

    --
    We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
  9. Translation: by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Google's 'Science Journal' App Turns Your Android Device Into Another Way To Provide Self-Tracking Data For Google To Monetize

    1. Re:Translation: by Sir+Holo · · Score: 1

      Google's 'Science Journal' App Turns Your Android Device Into Another Way To Provide Self-Tracking Data For Google To Monetize

      Do you think Google isn't already doing this? They wrote the OS, after all.

      This is just an app that lets the user access the sensors more directly.

  10. Will be awesome by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Wanna know how to spot the Google shill? They tell you how great (Google app/device) is based on what they think it might be later-
    -Nexus Q was awesome because of some imaginary v2 software
    -onhub- look at all these unused sensors and speaker! This will be awesome when it does something!
    -Wave is so amazing. Email will be dead just as soon as someone figures out what to do with this!
    -Science Journal may be very basic NOW, but you just wait and see how awesome it gets later!

  11. Headlines. by Areyoukiddingme · · Score: 1

    I thought from the title of the app that it was going to be a nice handy lab notebook app, with lots of helpful features and prompts for documenting your experimental apparatus. Maybe even specifically student/teacher friendly.

    But no, it's just another sensor data grapher, like a hundred others, except with more googlie eyes staring at you.

  12. Where do I put my makaks? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Not much of a lab this, is it?

  13. Backlash coming soon? by jandersen · · Score: 1

    From what I hear rumbling in the undergrowth, I get a feeling that there is a growing feeling of unease with the way big corporations gather data and with the purpose of doing so; this is obviously just another element in this. To readers of /. I suppose it is already blindingly obvious that Google don't do this simply because they are excited about 'science' and would love to share the experience with everybody, but people in general have been rather more trusting - but I think it is changing.

    The question is - what sort of backlash are we going to see? Will the smartphone market collapse eventually because people don't trust the companies and their intentions?

  14. Google plans to... by The-Ixian · · Score: 1

    Pull the plug on the app by the end of next year after all of the developers move on to shinier projects...

    --
    My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
  15. Or use one of the may other apps that do this by boristdog · · Score: 1

    I downloaded a free app a few weeks ago to take better advantage of all my phone's sensors. Tested the magnetometer, gravitometer on an old gold/silver mine in the mountains, as a matter of fact.

    Still didn't find gold.

  16. Are you the researcher or the experiment subject? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Will you have some creepy guy in the background looking over your shoulder using the network, building a profile on you during your whole use of the app? That's the norm for Google apps.