Week 5: Reverse STEM Fair

This week we had to prepare an abstract submission for the Howard University Middle School of Mathematics and Science Reverse STEM fair on November 16th. Here our research group, along with others, will present our research in a simplified way that a middle school student will be able to understand. Goal is to help get these students interested in research and in the STEM field.

The abstract had to be a simplified version of our project proposal and there were guidelines given to us to help us condense our abstract. We had to describe our problem, why it is important and how solving it will be beneficial to our field. We had to also explain our methods for solving our problem, our current results and our conclusions. The difficulty with the abstract was writing about results and our conclusion. We have no started collecting results because we are currently not in that phase of the project.

It was simple to express our current problem on a level that is appropriate for the the STEM fair. For the methods, we just stated what we would be doing to collect our data, which is essentially working with Ardublock to create the interface the user would interact with. I had to research for a while to find out how to write a proper abstract without any results or conclusions. What I learned was that it is possible. You can either leave your results out or vaguely determine what you can expect based on the results of similar projects. We referenced a 3D visual tool used in the Alice project from a related literature review that I wrote about a few weeks ago.

We finished the abstract on time and will be working on our poster until the fair. I will include the abstract in this blog post.

Abstract:

The rise of the Internet of Things has increased the need for programmers who are confident and competent, and the problem is that a large portion of computer science students leave the program after their first year. We believe block programming will engage students and help them learn so that we retain these future computer scientists.The design space of IoT applications is enormous, so this project narrows down to a single IoT system, cloud platform, and user app. We used a block programming tool called Ardublock to create the interface the user would interact with.The IoT system that is to be programmed is a

BeagleBone Black device, the cloud platform will be the stock AT&T M2X system, and the user app will be created using AppInventor. In a related study, "Evaluating the Effectiveness of a New Instructional Approach", the students who used the visual 3D tool and participated in a different curriculum called the "Alice course" had a better retention rate than those who did not participate in the course. This shows that visualization tools such as the one used in the Alice Program and like the Block Programming tool we plan to use, improve retention rates of computer science students after their first year. We currently do not have any findings that can support or reject our hypothesis, but we are hopeful that block programming will improve the retention of students in computer science.