In this paper, we describe an ongoing educational program, called NEWTON Fab Lab STEM, developed by the EU Horizon 2020 NEWTON project team. It aims at evaluating the impact of using digital fabrication as a support tool to raise students' interest in STEM subjects. We also present a case study of a small-scale pilot test that was deployed at Saint Patrick's Boys National School in Drumcondra, Dublin, Ireland. Results show that 83% of students who took part in the pilot test would like to integrate digital fabrication technologies in science classes.
Water is a major preoccupation for our generation since it is crucial in keeping a healthy ecosystem and supporting biodiversity. The state of aquatic systems and water bodies needs to be continiously monitored to make informed decisions and trigger sanitation when necessary. However, observing and tracking the evolution of many water bodies without disturbing and polluting the biotopes is expensive, not scalable, and thus infeasible. This paper presents a way to make sustainable measurements using a new low-cost, open-source, and autonomous monitoring system deployable in a broad network. The smart buoy is deployed and controlled by a central unit that uses lab-graded sensors to measure ambient factors. The custom electronic board offers sustainable electronics integration emphasizing power path and network connectivity. The smart buoy showed an average power consumption of 1.8mA and a cost of 932 euros per device. Currently, five spots have been monitored, which allowed the understanding of why biological events, such as a massive fish dead, occurred. The system is easily expandable and can be used in various applications to increase the knowledge of the underwater ecosystem.
Fabrication-as-a-Service (FaaS) represents a method and a set of innovative solutions for the next generation fabrication laboratories (Fab Labs). It leverages cloud and IoT technologies to enable a wide learning community to have remote access to these labs' computer-controlled tools and equipment over the Internet. This paper introduces FaaS in the context of Fab Lab challenges and describes FaaS instantiation in NEWTON Fab Labs, part of an European Horizon 2020 project. The NEWTON Fab Labs architecture is described in details with a major focus on the communication protocol stack. The system has been deployed and a test scenario that simulates a real user behavior has been setup in order to stress system performance and measure the system response time in different operating conditions.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.