
COSMOS Team Among the Winners of the Verizon 5G EdTech Challenge
The COSMOS team participated in the Verizon 5G EdTech Challenge, a nationwide open call to find innovative, cutting-edge, education technologies that will transform middle school
One of the main goals of COSMOS testbed is to take advantage of the educational and research experience of its academic partners and transform the testbed-generated research into an innovative learning platform for students. To this direction, COSMOS project focuses on local educational outreach, especially towards minorities underrepresented in STEM. This goal is extremely important to be able to retain support for the deployment of the testbed within the West Harlem community and in the New York City in general.
COSMOS team designed and implemented an educational platform and accompanying toolkit which allow K12 students to learn basic as well as advanced STEM concepts through running experiments either locally or on the COSMOS testbed. The impact of using an advanced research testbed as an educational resource and enabling its access remotely for a large number of students is very significant, especially for schools that lack the technological and instructional resources to prepare students for a future in the digital world.
Taking advantage of this significant asset for hands-on learning, COSMOS is focusing on creating a strong educational outreach program targeting NYC public schools, especially those located in Harlem, which have a high percentage of minority students that are underrepresented in STEM.
COSMOS education plan for K12 is twofold: 1) To create a strong, innovative and concrete set of methods and tools that will enhance STEM education for K12 students in NYC, 2) To work together with STEM teachers, to enhance their professional development and to collaboratively create hands-on educational material for NYC students.
The educational activities of COSMOS will strongly benefit from the involvement of the PAWR consortium companies in K12 activities in the local community. Many of the COSMOS industrial partners have programs that support schools and the community in STEM education improvements. Combining the experience of the COSMOS academic partners on developing educational material based on testbed experiments, with the experience of the industrial partners supporting local communities and schools, will significantly enhance the COSMOS education and outreach program.
The outreach activities and accomplishments of the COSMOS team include the training of 10 NYC teachers within the NSF Research Experience for Teachers (RET) program in Summer 2018, 10 teachers in a joint RET program and NSF EFRI New-LAW Research Experience and Mentoring (REM) program in Summer 2019, and 7 teachers in joint RET/REM virtual program in Summer 2020. The experience gained in this program and the program outcomes are summarized in [1],[2] below. Additional accomplishments include the release of the COSMOS Education Toolkit, winning a grant from the Verizon 5G EdTech Challenge (for the 5G Covet project), participation in Silicon Harlem’s 5th and 6th Annual Next-Gen Tech Conferences and the NE-ASTE 2018 and 2019 Conferences, engagement of the AT&T Foundation in funding graduate student stipends to support COSMOS-trained K-12 teachers, and selection as finalist in the 2020 GLOMOAwards in MWC Barcelona 2020.
This program was supported in part by REM supplement to NSF award EFMA-1641100 (NewLAW EFRI), RET supplements to NSF awards ECCS-1547406, CNS-1650685, CNS-1650669, CNS- 1702952, CNS-1527750, ECCS-1547332, CNS-1513110, CNS-1730043, CNS-1329939, OAC-1541069, the Columbia Data Science Institute, AT&T foundation, and NSF awards CNS-1827923 (PAWR COSMOS) and OAC-2029295, and NSF-BSF award CNS-1910757.
COSMOS education and outreach program is supported by the NYU Center for K12 STEM Education and Columbia Engineering Outreach Program.
[1] P. Skrimponis, N. Makris, S. Borges Rajguru, K. Cheng, J. Ostrometzky, E. Ford, Z. Kostic, G. Zussman, and T. Korakis, “COSMOS Educational Toolkit: Using Experimental Wireless Networking to Enhance Middle/High School STEM Education,” ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, vol. 50, no. 4, Oct. 2020. [download]
[2] P. Skrimponis, N. Makris, K. Cheng, J. Ostrometzky, Z. Kostic, G. Zussman, T. Korakis, and S. Borges Rajguru, “Evaluation: A teacher professional development program using wireless communications and NGSS to enhance STEM teaching & learning,” in Proc. ASEE Annual Conference, 2020. [download] [presentation][video]
[Feb 2021] Applications for the Summer 2021 COSMOS-NewLAW RET/REM Program will soon be open
The COSMOS team participated in the Verizon 5G EdTech Challenge, a nationwide open call to find innovative, cutting-edge, education technologies that will transform middle school
On December 13 2018 the COSMOS team and the ten high school teachers that participated in the COSMOS RET 2018 summer program, met in a
Silicon Harlem, COSMOS’ community partner, held its 5th Annual Next-Gen Tech Conference on Oct. 26, 2018 at the National Black Theatre. Emily Ford from Columbia
NYC High school teachers Juditha Damiao from Joseph F. Lamb high school (PS/IS 206), Richard Foster from Parkside Preparatory Academy (MS2), and Patrick Callahan from
The recently released COSMOS education toolkit consists of the following components: A hardware setup: A small scale testbed with basic COSMOS components as SDR nodes, IoT nodes,
COSMOS is part of the National Science Foundation’s PAWR program and is funded in part by NSF award CNS-1827923 and by the PAWR Industry Consortium.
Rutgers University.
Dipankar Raychaudhuri and Ivan Seskar
WINLAB
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ray@winlab.rutgers.edu
seskar@winlab.rutgers.edu
Columbia University
Gil Zussman
Electrical Engineering, M.C. 4712
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New York, NY 10027
gil.zussman@columbia.edu
New York University
Sundeep Rangan
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srangan@nyu.edu