Work in progress: Using modern mobile technologies in STEM education

With advances in modern mobile devices and the increasing use of smart phones and tablets by students, there is an opportunity to provide enhanced and personalized educational experiences and convenient remote access to course material. This paper describes an education research endeavor aimed at developing, packaging and assessing course content, interactive learning modules, educational simulations, and visualization examples for smart phones and tablets. Our efforts focus on integrating existing and new tools, optimized for smart phones and tablets, in undergraduate Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) courses. The project brings together several technologies including a Java simulation environment, an Android operating system with several dedicated apps, Blackboard MobileTM Learn, Sprint ID and others. The hypothesis here is that the creation of a "central" education site with maximum mobility will be compelling to undergraduate students that seem fascinated by the exciting multi-tasking possibilities that smart phones and tablets bring these days. In this paper, we will work on the development and assessment of a portal for mobile devices that will enable students to operate several state of the art education mobile applications (apps) seamlessly. These apps include visualization modules, mobile labs, lecture video viewing, quiz taking, homework/lab submission applets, and customized educational web site access. An assessment task will be a senior level signal processing class to examine several aspects of the mobile student learning experience.