Cutting-edge technical research in the US is using video links to foster interests in pupils, writes IAN CAMPBELL
STUDENTS IN a Co Offaly secondary school will have no excuse for saying science is boring when a high-definition video link goes live and connects them directly to research labs in the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) in Atlanta, US.
The “virtual field trips” are part of the Direct To Discover programme, an initiative run by Dr Jeff Evans, a principal research engineer at the GTRI who is exploring ways in which communications technology can empower classrooms and help rejuvenate interest in science.
“Students will be able to look through a million-dollar electron microscope and listen to research scientists talk about nanotechnology. You can’t replicate that in textbooks,” he said.
Initially, the link will be displayed on flat-screen TVs, but there are plans to integrate the connection with interactive whiteboards.
The GTRI has an office in Athlone and the school project came about through co-operation with the Atlantic Corridor, the Midlands development body that hosted a conference yesterday on science and education. Dr Evans had flown in from the US to be a guest speaker.
Chosen for the trial was Killina Presentation Secondary School, 16km (10 miles) from Tullamore, Co Offaly. As part of the Department of Communications Post-Primary Schools Project, it is being upgraded to a 100Mbps connection, facilitating high-speed connection to the GTRI. “With sufficient bandwidth, there is low latency and almost no jitter, so you almost forget about the technology,” said Dr Evans.
Gerry Buckley, chief executive officer of Network Infrastructure Support, the third partner in the project, said the connection will be more than a one-way link to the institute. “The plan will be to connect up with other schools and facilities in North America. The possibilities are endless once the infrastructure and technology are in place.”
The high-speed link, which comprises a dual-band WiMax interface connected to the Higher Education Authority’s network backbone, is expected to go live in the middle of April.
For Dr Evans, it is the latest chapter in a series of research projects that has already seen positive outcomes closer to his home. Barrow County is a rural part of Georgia with a schools system that had failed to send a single high-school graduate to the GTRI in the three years before the high-definition link was introduced. “It’s only anecdotal evidence but, since we gave schools a direct connection to the labs, we’ve seen five students enrol,” he said. “Their parents are going to record testimonials about how they saw the experience stimulate their children and [how it] led them to apply.”
The plan is to build up qualitative research over a year (hopefully involving the Irish school as well), and tracking students to see whether exposure to cutting-edge research encourages greater science uptake.
Ireland is clearly not alone in its struggle to drive interest in maths and science at secondary level. The Direct To Discover programme is about connecting small secondary schools at the point where students either lose or find an interest in science.
Dr Evans said it is the immediacy of the virtual exchange that is a significant leap over existing teaching practices. “We show students what is being made with nanotechnology today. It takes five years to get a textbook approved for a curriculum and, in some schools in Georgia, that book could be 13 years old. We’re showing them science that they won’t find in books.”
While classroom technology can help, Dr Evans recognises that there are big challenges when it comes to introducing new elements into a crowded timetable, where the main focus is passing exams.
“We’re running into a lot of issues because teachers are required to stick to a curriculum. In many cases, a curriculum suppresses innovation. I didn’t come up with the phrase,” he said, “but the fundamental point is that we’re teaching kids today for jobs that don’t yet exist.”
To overcome the barriers, Dr Evans has submitted proposals to raise funding in Georgia for sessions to occur on a weekly basis that are tied in to the science curriculum. Each teacher would run “interventions”, classes based around real-time communications with the research faculty.
The other objective with Dr Evans’s work around communications has been to bridge the digital divide, or “flatten the educational environment”, as he puts it. “We want to try and make sure that a kid growing up in a poorer rural area has the same access to learning as kids in a well-off suburb. Everyone would benefit from that.”
In his wider research, Dr Evans has spent many years looking at advanced network technologies and applications around last-mile access, particularly for rural, underserved communities. The focus has been on WiMax, the wide area wireless technology that connects communities where cable can’t reach, but next-generation 4G mobile services, known as Long Term Evolution (LTE), are now competing in the same space.
“WiMax will now play only a niche role, and eventually the two technologies will converge. We are already seeing combined chipsets that do LTE and WiMax,” he said. One theory is that mobile operators will use WiMax on handsets in underdeveloped countries, and LTE where the cellular infrastructure is more mature.
“The reality is that people won’t care about the back-end technology,” said Dr Evans. “They just want their applications to perform the way they want, when they want.”
