Today, for the sixth consecutive year, President Obama is celebrating all things STEM with students from across the country at the White House Science Fair. View the White House press release, full release can be found here. You can join us at the fair virtually by watching the live webcast or by sharing your inventions and ideas on Twitter using the hashtag #WHScienceFair.
From robots to rockets, Mozilla loves science, technology, engineering and math. Add in gigabit technology and you get STEM education projects that wouldn’t be possible with traditional broadband internet connections, making learning more immediate, immersive, and accessible. Move over baking soda volcanoes.
Here are a few of the projects we’ve supported through the Gigabit Community Fund:
[Chattanooga] The brainchild of Gig City Production’s Jonathan Susman, Adagio is a cloud-based remote audio mixing tool co-developed with UTC Computer Science Professor Craig Tannis and several of his graduate students. Utilizing Chattanooga’s gigabit network, Adagio’s cloud-based platform drastically lowers the financial and technological barriers to mixing audio, granting students and professionals alike access to studio-quality tools right in their browser.
[Kansas City] The Gigabots from Big Bang bring connected robotics and devices to classrooms using existing educational robotics platforms. A Gigabot is a combination of hardware, software and a cloud platform. Each Gigabot is connected to others from any location in real-time. This project takes robotics to a new frontier in science and engineering through programming, all while teaching kids how to share innovation in collaborative ways.
[Chattanooga] GigBridge, proposed by Girls Preparatory School (GPS) senior Anjali Chandra, connects students via streaming video at Chattanooga Girls Leadership Academy and East Lake Academy, two Title I schools in Hamilton County. With the help of Jill Pala, GPS’s Chair of Computer Science, the Spanish department and her classmates — as well as support from UTC and TVA — Anjali ran an after-school program focusing on English as a second language and healthier lifestyle skills through app design, developing a publicly-available digital literacy curriculum along the way. Students learned the basics of and built mobile applications over the course of eight weeks, creating English and Spanish versions. Anjali has since received additional funding from Causeway to help continue the project.
You can learn more about these projects and others in Chattanooga and Kansas City. Living in a city where you can leverage gigabit technology for education? Join us at the Gigabit City Summit, May 16-18 in Kansas City, exclusively designed for leaders in current and emerging gigabit cities.
The White House Science Fair is today