WiFi for the Masses: An Innovative Summer Program Introduces Students to Cutting-Edge Technology, and Teaches Them to Use It to Help Build a Wireless Network for Local Residents
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ROCHESTER, NY, IS A HOTBED of technological activity. Home to major corporations such as Bausch & Lomb, Kodak, and Xerox, as well as the University of Rochester and the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), the city nestled along the banks of Lake Ontario cut its teeth on bringing innovation to the masses. Yet, for a town so richly steeped in technology, Rochester has no city-sponsored public WiFi network--a failure that a group of student entrepreneurs hopes to erase for the good of the community through a series of summertime projects. Rochester Digital Ripple Project (www.rochester digitalripple.com) is an interdisciplinary entrepreneurial training program for Rochester-area students in grades 7 to 12. Developed in 2006, the summer program offers a holistic learning environment that incorporates technology, math, and science along with art, language arts, social studies, and physical education. During the program, students learn about wireless mesh networking and web development, and build their own node, which is used to create a WiFi network within a select area of Rochester--in the current instance, the South Wedge neighborhood. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] program was created by Art for Everyone (www.art foreveryone.us), an organization that promotes the melding of art and technology through local, national, and international projects. Art for Everyone is run by a trio of RIT graduates who see the connection between art and IT, understanding that both are means of communicating, says Eric Grace, one of the Digital Ripple Project directors and a former art teacher in the Rochester City School District. other project directors are Keith Simmons, an IT professional currently doing research in the Laboratory for Technological Literacy at RIT's B. Thomas Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences (GCCIS), and Robyn Neill, a teacher in the Rochester City School District. three of them were in the computing lab when officials from the City of Rochester came in to discuss the feasibility of implementing a wireless network within the city limits. Grace says that his group, already at work developing curriculum to combine art and technology, saw a synergy between what the city was asking for and what they could do: We realized if we tweaked the curriculum, we could make it work for what Rochester needed. group created a 360-page curriculum that encompasses all aspects of a program that will eventually provide the city--or at least part of it--with a wireless network, while giving students real-world experience in understanding and building the network. curriculum was developed with New York state learning standards in mind, and exceeds those standards in math, science, technology, art, and language arts. It also addresses standards in social studies and physical education. Phase 1 of the program, which began in the summer of 2006, was run through the Rochester After School Academy (RASA; www.rasa.itartist.com), which also provided the funding. focal point of Phase 1 was the Edgerton Recreation Center in downtown Rochester. Twenty-three students from all around Rochester and its surrounding suburbs were paid stipends and were considered employees of the project. As employees, not only did the students get experience and skills working, but some had never had any computer classes, Grace says. The program taught them things like graphic design, web design, and how to write a resume and create a web page, and each student built his own web page and posted his resume and experience on the site. It also taught them hardware and software--how to put computers together and take them apart, upgrade them, etc.--and cutting-edge technology about mesh networks. Students also learned about WiFi--what it means as well as the science and math behind it--and each made a makeshift antenna for practice and research. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".