EAGER: C3STEM: Enabling Community-Situated, Challenge-Based, Collaborative STEM Education Using Broadband Cyber Infrastructure

Vanderbilt University, Nashville TN

Investigators

Abstract

This project uses broadband communication to support a diverse community of STEM learners, including K-12 students, their teachers and parents, school administrators, community organizers, city planners, and university faculty and graduate students. The project will build a community-situated, challenge-based, collaborative cyber-learning environment (C3STEM) that harnesses computational thinking, modeling, simulation, and challenge-based learning to support STEM learning in the context of a city traffic planning. C3STEM will use the traffic domain as the source for real-world problems for STEM education by developing projects through which high school students (from at least two schools) will collaboratively address problems of traffic congestion and safety in urban and suburban environments. Classroom-based student groups will work with their classroom teacher, traffic experts, and the Vanderbilt researchers to analyze real traffic data from regions near their homes and schools. The collaborative effort will lead to the students gaining an understanding of the traffic patterns, which will support the students developing agent-based models that align with the observed patterns in their section (e.g., traffic congestion along selected thoroughfares at different times of day and the effects of stoplights and interstate on/off-ramps). This process will teach fundamental concepts of data analysis and computer-based modeling and will motivate other curriculum-related mathematics and science lessons such as, Physics concepts, such as inertia, speed and acceleration, and Mathematical concepts, such as algebra, calculus, probability, and statistics. The project will leverage GENI and broadband infrastructure to provide real-time collaborative sessions and large-scale data transfers. Broader Impact: Via the combination of broadband communication, live data from community resources, computational modeling and collaborative learning, the products of student labor will not simply be for a grade, but their work will be regarded as an contribution to the community. This represents a cultural shift, which not only puts STEM in the foreground of active citizenship, but also raises the stature of teachers and K-12 education. The project results will be not only disseminated through journals and conferences but student projects will be displayed on a Web-based 'science-fair' and the PIs will create a Wikibook that archives the lesson plans and their evaluation. This text can be added to and revised by the community, as well as informing and supporting future community-situated, challenge-based programs.