SPARKvue and PASCO Capstone – software for STEM lessons

SPARKvue and PASCO Capstone are two software products for collecting, analyzing and visualizing data collected from digital laboratories for STEM lessons. Both software products are developed by Pasco Scientific.

Schools are more likely to use SPARKvue. Since it is often more convenient to collect data on tablets and smartphones. Plus SPARKvue is free to use for iPad, Android, Chromebook. Often, SPARKvue is preferred by those teachers who spend part of the classes outside the classroom, as well as teachers of Chemistry and Biology, as it is convenient when there are no wires on the table, and the data is transmitted to the tablet from a wireless sensor. Universities are more likely to use PASCO CAPSTONE or both.

SPARKvue

SPARKvue is a popular data collection, visualization, and analysis app for STEM education that supports 29 languages, including Russian.

SPARKvue includes 14 preloaded interactive SPARKlab labs. And over 80 more labs are available for free download.

SPARKlab files are interactive presentations of laboratory work in which teachers can combine theory, real-time data collection and analysis, and knowledge control.

SPARKvue allows you to connect over 80 wireless sensors via Bluetooth to measure and display real-time footage
data in the form of graphs, charts, tables.

An indisputable synergy is provided by the joint use of software and wireless sensors, which allow reading data from sensors at a distance of up to 10 meters via Bluetooth. This allows you to organize group work by distributing the roles of participants. Someone gets the role of the leader of the experiment and has a tablet or phone in his hands, and someone is responsible for collecting samples and a sensor, let’s call this role a laboratory assistant. It is clear that for various studies it is necessary to give a try in one or another role.

Data analysis in SPARKvue takes place using built-in statistical tools (min, max, mean, standard deviation, count and area).

In the Shared session mode, the experiment data is stored over the Internet to a PASCO SCIENTIFIC server and from there can be read by other participants in the learning process. So one can collect, but see and analyze everything. And all this in real time. The collected data can also be transferred via cloud file sharing services such as Dropbox for example.

Watch an introductory video about the possibilities of SPARKvue.

PASCO CAPSTONE

The desktop option, and together with our supplied Bluetooth adapter, wireless sensors and PASCO Capstone, is preferred by teachers who focus on analyzing collected data, identifying patterns and relationships between quantities, for example, physics teachers. Since PASCO Capstone has a more complete toolkit for processing the collected data. Both products have an intuitive interface, allow you to easily design the type of output graphs and tables as you wish, as well as export the collected data series to CSV format. This allows, for example, in Excel spreadsheets to subsequently verify the series of experiments collected from different sensors.

Distinctive features of PASCO CAPSTONE are the ability to create custom tables, enter custom data for benchmarking, copy and paste equations

Capture and analyze video. In this case, the user can synchronize the video with the data.

Watch the PASCO Capstone introduction video.

PASCO Capstone is paid software for Mac OS / Windows operating environments . You can choose from a personal license for a single computer and a license for an educational institution. Our recommendation is that if you intend to use the software on more than 10 computers, feel free to choose a license for an educational institution.

The big advantage that distinguishes the SPARKvue and PASCO Capstone licenses is the fact that once you acquire the right to use you no longer have to think about the additional costs of updating it. All new versions are free for you, no additional costs for annual upgrades or additional payments when changing Windows versions, for example.

Comparison of SPARKvue and PASCO Capstone

For more questions about SPARKvue and PASCO Capstone, see [SPARKvue or Capstone; ENG] on the manufacturer’s website.

PASCO Spectrometry

There is also special software for niche products, such as PASCO Spectrometry. As the name suggests, this is software for taking data from a spectrometer. There is software for fixing readings on a computer from digital accurate scales. This software is free.

PASCO SCIENTIFIC pays great attention to methodological developments. They describe in full the process of conducting the experiment, the theoretical part, the point of focus, conclusions and control questions on the topic. The main language of the materials is English, but some of them have already been translated into Russian too. There have been cases where the use of materials in English has been used in the upper grades to deliver combined lessons. This is of particular interest to students planning to study science in English in higher education.

For more information about using teaching materials, read the article “How to quickly create a lesson plan with new teaching equipment?”.

Essential Physics and Essential Chemistry

For teachers who have a sufficient level of knowledge of the English language, we also offer a series of electronic textbooks: Essential Physics and Essential Chemistry. These tutorials are paid, but we can request a trial period for those who want to try them. It is interesting that, having abandoned traditional textbooks, all schools in several states in the USA and Saudi Arabia completely switched to them.

For getting quotes please email ask@ste(.)education. (Don’t forget to remove the parentheses () from the email address before sending.)