SBIR Phase I: A STEM toolkit enabling global air quality experiments

SBIR第一阶段项目旨在解决环境科学体验式学习的主要痛点：在有限的地方进行引人入胜的实验几乎是不可能的。 区域或全球合作的能力将使学生能够参与对自然和人为事件对空气质量影响的有意义的探索。该项目以一种让学生参与现实世界问题的方式教授环境科学，并允许他们利用自己的创造力。 这些方法已被证明是特别有效的鼓励年轻妇女追求科学，技术，工程和数学（STEM）教育计划和职业。这一点特别重要，因为少数群体和妇女在这些领域的代表性都很低。通过这个项目的成功商业化和整合？通过将由此产生的技术与高中和中学后课程相结合，教育工作者将增加学生从事STEM职业的可能性。 鼓励这些领域的继续教育，特别是对代表性不足的群体，将导致更多样化的劳动力，促进更大的生产力和科学发现的进步。该项目是教育技术领域的创新，该领域尚未采用网络连接的传感器，以产生全球范围的大数据。 这主要是由于目前的技术容易出现不准确和故障，并且通常难以使用。拟议的项目将导致创建教育软件，补充现有的硬件，使产品系统有趣，易于安装和使用。该应用程序将促进全球网络中的数据共享，包括：地理信息系统制图、连续记录、时间平均、注释以及与兼容软件系统的集成。该项目力求实现三个主要目标。 首先，将构建一个用户友好的工具来查看和分析数据。 这将通过一个焦点小组的反馈进行评估。 第二，将通过教育工作者和研究人员的合作，建立一个课程，以确保教育工作者和学生的教育有用性。最后，将通过原型开发测试可用性和可行性。 为此，将招募学生与原型进行互动，并评估应用程序的用户友好性和课程的有效性。 建议项目的成功包括演示所开发软件的可用性、可行性和教育效果。

This SBIR Phase I project seeks to address the primary pain point for experiential learning of environmental science: it is nearly impossible to conduct engaging experiments on a limited local basis. The ability to collaborate regionally or globally will enable students to participate in meaningful exploration of the impact of natural and human-based events on air quality. This project teaches environmental science in a way that engages students with real-world problems and allows them to harness their own creativity. These methods have been shown to be especially effective for encouraging young women to pursue science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) educational programs and careers. This is particularly important as both minorities and women are highly underrepresented in these fields. Through successful commercialization and integration of this project?s resulting technology with high school and post-secondary curricula, educators will increase the likelihood of their students to pursue STEM careers. Encouraging further education in these fields, particularly for underrepresented groups, will lead to a more diversified work force promoting greater productivity and advancement of scientific discovery.This project is innovative in the field of Educational Technology, which has yet to adopt web-connected sensors that generate big data on a global scale. This is primarily due to the fact that current technology is prone to inaccuracy and failure, and is often difficult to use. The proposed project will lead to the creation of educational software, a complement existing hardware, to make the product system fun and easy to install and use. The app will facilitate data-sharing in a global network and include: GIS mapping, continuous logging, time averaging, annotation, and integration with compatible software systems. This project seeks to achieve three key objects. First, a user-friendly tool will be built to view and analyze data. This will be assessed using feedback from a focus group. Second, a curriculum will be constructed through educator-researcher collaboration to ensure educational usefulness for both educators and their students. Lastly, usability and feasibility will be tested through prototype development. For this objective students will be recruited to interact with the prototype and evaluate the user-friendliness of the app and effectiveness of the curriculum. The success of the proposed project includes demonstration of usability, feasibly and educational effectiveness of the developed software.