Paper Info
Title
COSMOS educational toolkit: using experimental wireless networking to enhance middle/high school STEM education
Abstract
AbstractThis paper focuses on the K-12 educational activities of COSMOS-Cloud enhanced Open Software defined MObile wireless testbed for city-Scale deployment. The COSMOS wireless reasearch testbed is being deployed in West Harlem (New York City) as part of the NSF Platforms for Advanced Wireless Research (PAWR) program. COSMOS' approach for K-12 education is twofold: (i) create an innovative and concrete set of methods/tools that allow teaching STEM subjects using live experiments related to wireless networks/IoT/cloud, and (ii) enhance the professional development (PD) of K-12 teachers and collaborate with them to create hands-on educational material for the students. The COSMOS team has already conducted successful pilot summer programs for middle and high school STEM teachers, where the team worked with the teachers and jointly developed innovative real-world experiments that were organized as automated and repeatable math, science, and computer science labs to be used in the classroom. The labs run on the COSMOS Educational Toolkit, a hardware and software system that offers a large variety of pre-orchestrated K-12 educational labs. The software executes and manages the experiments in the same operational philosophy as the COSMOS testbed. Specifically, since it is designed for use by non-technical middle and high school teachers/students, it adds easy-to-use enhancements to the experiments' execution and the results visualization. The labs are also supported by Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)-compliant teacher/student material. This paper describes the teachers' PD program, the NGSS lessons created and the hardware and software system developed to support the initiative. Additionally, it provides an evaluation of the PD approach as well as the expected impact to K-12 STEM education. Current limitations and future work are also included as part of the discussion section.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.1145/3431832.3431839
SIGCOMM
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Computer Networks, Wireless Networks and Communications, Software-Defined Radios, Outreach, K-12 Education, NGSS Curriculum, Laboratory Experience, Professional Development, STEM
Journal
50
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
4
0146-4833
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
9
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Panagiotis Skrimponis100.68
Nikos Makris229236.93
Sheila Borges Rajguru300.34
Karen Cheng400.34
Jonatan Ostrometzky5215.52
Emily Ford600.34
Zoran Kostic701.69
Gil Zussman893373.38
Thanasis Korakis91401115.56