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A Teacher Professional Development Program Using Wireless Communications and NGSS to Enhance STEM Teaching and Learning

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Conference

2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access

Location

Virtual On line

Publication Date

June 22, 2020

Start Date

June 22, 2020

End Date

June 26, 2021

Conference Session

Pre-college Engineering Education Division Technical Session 1

Tagged Division

Pre-College Engineering Education

Tagged Topic

Diversity

Page Count

30

DOI

10.18260/1-2--34073

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/34073

Download Count

671

Paper Authors

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Panagiotis Skrimponis New York University Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0003-4161-0641

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Panagiotis is a Ph.D. student in Electrical and Computer Engineering at New York University, and a member of NYU Wireless, advised by Professor Sundeep Rangan. He previously earned his Diploma and MSc in Electrical and Computer Engineering from University of Thessaly in 2015 and 2018 respectively. From 2013-2018 he worked at Center for Research and Technology Hellas, Swiss Federal Institute of Lausanne, and New York University as a research assistant. His research interests include designing specialized hardware to accelerate applications on advanced FPGA platforms, developing network and communication algorithms on modern USRP/SDR platforms and prototyping ultra-low power nodes for IoT applications. Currently his main focus is on power consumption and performance optimizations for mmWave and THz communications. As part of the 'COSMOS educational team', he designs exciting and interactive problem-based STEM learning experiences for K–12 students and teachers. The team organized a teacher professional development program, using wireless communications and NGSS to create hands-on engineering lessons and promote STEM. He was part of one of the ten winning teams in Verizon's '5G EdTech Challenge', contributing in the development of several educational virtual reality applications.

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Nikos Makris University of Thessaly

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Nikos Makris is a Research Engineer working for University of Thessaly, Greece. He received his B. Eng. in 2011, his M. Sc. degree in Computer Science and Communications in 2013 and his PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2019 from the same department. Since 2011, he has been participating in several collaborative research projects with University of Thessaly. During the summers of 2018 and 2019, he was a visiting scientist in New York University (NYU) working in the outreach activities of the COSMOS project. His research interests include experimentally driven research with several radio access technologies (WiFi, WiMAX, LTE, 5G-NR), conducted under real environment settings, the disaggregation of base station units, Multi-access Edge Computing and NFV orchestration using open source platforms.

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Karen Cheng Columbia University

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Dr. Karen Cheng is an Outreach Program Specialist at Columbia University School of Engineering and Applied Science. A former research scientist turned high school math teacher, she recently completed her Ph.D. in mathematics and STEM teacher education, with research interests in the development of professional motivation and self-efficacy among K-12 STEM teachers in the framework of out-of-school enrichment programs. With the wireless communications research experience for teachers, she coordinated logistics during the summer and provided day-to-day curriculum development and implementation support for teacher participants throughout the year. Having extensive experience in working with both rural and urban education settings, her current responsibilities at Columbia's School of Engineering include building partnerships between educational institutions, industry partners, and community schools in an effort to create greater access to high-quality STEM education opportunities for all.

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Jonatan Ostrometzky Columbia University Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0003-4750-8656

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Jonatan Ostrometzky received his B.Sc. degree (Magna Cum Laude) in Electrical Engineering from Tel-Aviv University, Israel, in 2009. He received his M.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering (through the Accelerated Master Program), and his Ph.D. from Tel-Aviv University in 2012 and 2017, respectively. He was a postdoctoral research scientist at Columbia University (supervised by Prof. Gil Zussman) between 2018 and 2020, where he led WiMNet lab’s NSF-BSF project in the area of wireless networks robustness via weather-sensitive predictive management, and has performed research in the area of power grid resilience and worked on the COSMOS project. In particular, Jonathan focused on the COSMOS program for middle and high school teachers. Currently, Jonatan is a faculty member at the Faculty of Engineering, Tel-Aviv University.

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Zoran Kostic Columbia University

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Zoran Kostic completed his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering at the University of Rochester and his Dipl. Ing. degree at the University of Novi Sad. He spent most of his career in industry where he worked in research, product development and in leadership positions.

Zoran's expertise spans mobile data systems, wireless communications, signal processing, multimedia, system-on-chip development and applications of parallel computing. His present research addresses Internet of Things systems and physical data analytics, smart cities, and applications of deep learning in autonomous vehicle navigation, medicine and health. His work comprises a mix of research, system architecture and software/hardware development, which resulted in a notable publication record, three dozen patents, and critical contributions to successful products. He has experience in Intellectual Property consulting.

Dr. Kostic is an active member of the IEEE, and he has served as an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Communications and IEEE Communications Letters.

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Gil Zussman Columbia University Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0002-1845-4460

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Gil Zussman received the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Technion in 2004. Between 2004 and 2007 he was a Postdoctoral Associate in MIT. Since 2007 he has been with Columbia University where he is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (affiliated faculty), and member of the Data Science Institute. He is a co-recipient of 7 paper awards including the ACM SIGMETRICS'06 Best Paper Award, the 2011 IEEE Communications Society Award for Advances in Communication, and the ACM CoNEXT'16 Best Paper Award. He received the Fulbright Fellowship, the DTRA Young Investigator Award, two Marie Curie Fellowships, and the NSF CAREER Award. He was a member of a team that won first place in the 2009 Vodafone Foundation Wireless Innovation Project competition and is currently the Columbia PI of the NSF PAWR COSMOS project.

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Thanasis Korakis New York University

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Thanasis Korakis received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in informatics and telecommunications from the University of Athens, Greece, in 1994 and 1997, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in computer and communication engineering from the University of Thessaly, Greece, in 2005. He is a Research Assistant Professor with the ECE Department, NYU Tandon School of Engineering, NY, USA. He is also with the New York State Center for Advanced Technology in Telecommunications, NYU Tandon School of Engineering. In 2004, he was a Visiting Researcher with the CSE Department, University of California at Riverside, Riverside, CA, USA. He holds five patents. His research interests include access layer protocols, cooperative networks, directional antennas, quality of service provisioning, and network management.

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Sheila Borges Rajguru Rutgers - The State University of New Jersey Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0003-3152-1565

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Sheila Borges Rajguru, a K-16+ educator and researcher, obtained a PhD degree from Teachers College, Columbia University in STEM education. Trained as a biomedical scientist at Rutgers University and NYU she leverages both fields of study —education and STEM— to build and maintain collaborations between institutions of higher education, K-12 schools, community leaders, and corporations in order to conduct multi and interdisciplinary work. Other areas of work include: collaborating with engineers and scientists to enhance STEM education, mentorship of early-career researchers, and identifying systems of inequities in order to come up with solutions for social change. Furthermore, Dr. Borges is co-chair of the Northeastern Association for Science Teacher Education (NE-ASTE) and currently works at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey to enhance the grant portfolio of the School of Social Work.

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Abstract

The global economy is changing vis-à-vis technological advances. In order to keep up with the needs of industry and the latest innovations, all students must be prepared to enter science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) careers. Higher education is critical in preparing the next generation of STEM professionals however, when precollege students are not prepared to tackle the rigor and/or are alienated from STEM due to their K—12 experiences this lack of preparedness affects innovation. Therefore, supporting teachers expand their engineering knowledge through research experiences and collaborating with them to come up with authentic, hands-on lessons could have positive effects in STEM teaching and learning.

To address this challenge, we developed a teacher professional development (PD) program and a toolkit consisting of a hardware and software system to engage New York City STEM teachers who work with urban students-of-color in learning about wireless technology through various hands-on activities and collaborative research. The PD relates to the Cloud Enhanced Open Software Defined Mobile Wireless Testbed for City-Scale Deployment (COSMOS) testbed that is being deployed in West Harlem (New York City) and to the NSF ERFI NewLAW project which focuses on wireless communication. The PD program took place in Summers 2018 and 2019 within the frameworks of Research Experience for Teachers (RET) and Research Experience and Mentoring (REM) programs. Throughout the PD program, researchers along with teachers, co-created lessons aligned to the K—12 national standards called the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). Each standard called Performance Expectation (PE), incorporates the three-dimensional learning: Crosscutting Concepts (CCCs), Disciplinary Core Ideas (DCIs), and Science and Engineering Practices (SEPs). This teacher PD consists of six-week long summer program, which introduces ten participants to authentic wireless technology engineering experiences. The PD program is divided into two phases: (i) a two-week structured learning phase, during which the ten teachers attend lectures and perform hands-on experiments related to wireless communications. The scope of this phase is for participants to learn and understand the fundamental and some advanced concepts on wireless networks, digital communications, and internet-of-things (IoT), which focuses on the NGSS, PEs: MS-PS4.1-3 (Identify the characteristics of waves from the mathematical representation, and analyze the relationship of energy in terms of amplitude and frequency; Identify the type of the waves in nature, and how the characteristics change when they interact with materials; Conduct independent research on the claim that ‘digitized signals are a more reliable way to encode and transmit information than analog signals’); (ii) a four-week research phase, during which the teachers collaborate in research labs at NYU and Columbia and present their findings to receive feedback.

The outcomes of this program are the following: (i) The participants gained in-depth knowledge of the concept of electromagnetic wave propagation, resulting in the development of NGSS-aligned lucrative engineering labs that students will be exposed to during the academic year in their STEM courses; (ii) development of a hardware and software system that provides the necessary infrastructure for the lessons. The software is enhanced with an easy-to-use philosophy on the execution and management of the experiments since it was designed for K–12 teachers. Through follow-up sessions over the academic year, teachers will receive support for executing the experiments and implementing new engineering-based lessons. This paper will describe the teacher PD, the NGSS lessons created, and full description of the hardware and software system which teachers used to teach STEM.

Skrimponis, P., & Makris, N., & Cheng, K., & Ostrometzky, J., & Kostic, Z., & Zussman, G., & Korakis, T., & Borges Rajguru, S. (2020, June), A Teacher Professional Development Program Using Wireless Communications and NGSS to Enhance STEM Teaching and Learning Paper presented at 2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access, Virtual On line . 10.18260/1-2--34073

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