Annex 4:

Proposal full title: Networked labs for training in wireless systems and communication.

Proposal acronym: NEWTON Type of funding scheme:

Collaborative Project: Large-scale integrating project (IP)

Work programme topics addressed: FP7-ICT-2011.8.1 Technology-enhanced learning

Name of the coordinating person: Prof. Gianluca Cornetta

List of participants:

Participant no.	Participant legal name	Country	Organisation type*
1 (Coordinator)	San Pablo University Madrid	Spain	University
2	Xpertia SI	Spain	SME
3	IPLUSF	Spain	SME
4	ISEP Paris	France	University
5	Dublin City University	Ireland	University
6	National College of Ireland	Ireland	University
7	Brunel University London	United Kingdom	University
8	Vrije Universiteit Brussels	Belgium	University
9	Steinbeis Innovation	Germany	Research Lab
10	Marconi Labs	Italy	Company
11	Nexsoft	Italy	SME
12	University of Calabria	Italy	University
13	Polytechnic of Timisoara	Romania	University
14	Brno University of Technology	Czech Republic	University
15	Czech Technical University in Prague	Czech Republic	University
16	Technical University of Lodz	Poland	University
17	Norwegian Institute of Information Technology	Norway	University
18	Fokus Fraunhofer	Germany	Research Lab
19	Whiteloop	United Kingdom	SME
20	MIA	Italy	SME
21	Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava	Slovakia	University
22	Siemens Program and System Engineering	Slovakia	Company
23	Linkoping Unicersity	Swedwn	University
24	Helsinky Institute for Information Technology	Finland	University
25	European Schoolnet	-	To be confirmed

List of associated partners:

Partner	Partner legal name	Country	Organisation type*
1	Colegio “Pablo Coello”, Madrid	Spain	High School
2	Colegio “Montepríncipe”, Madrid	Spain	High School
3	Colegio “San Pablo”, Murcia	Spain	High School

4	Colegio “San Pablo”, Valencia	Spain	High School
5	Colegio “Jesús María”, Alicante	Spain	High School
6	Colegio “Sanchinarro”, Madrid	Spain	High School
7	Colegio “Virgen Niña”, Vitoria	Spain	High School
8	Colegio “Loreto”, Barcelona	Spain	High School
9	Colegio “Cardenal Spinola”, Barcelona	Spain	High School
10	Istituto Tecnico Industriale Statale “Galileo Galiei”, Salerno	Italy	High School
11	Istituto Tecnico Statale “Basilio Focaccia”, Salerno	Italy	High School
12		France	High School
13		France	High School

Estimated budget
Participant no.	RTD activities	Demonstration	Management	Other activities	Total



Total eligible costs:
Requested EC contribution:

1: Scientific and/or technical quality, relevant to the topics addressed by the call

1.1 Concept and objectives

It is a matter of fact that several European countries are actually experiencing a crisis amongst their younger generations in respect of scientific vocations 1 . The number of students enrolling at universities and specialising in scientific disciplines started to decline during the 1990s in many European countries, and nowadays Europe has to face the concrete risk of a shortage of scientists. The study of Convert, also remarks that the loss of scientific vocations is a global phenomenon, as also US have also experienced in the last

30 years a very marked erosion in the number of young people graduating in the basic sciences, i.e. mathematics and physical sciences, and a corresponding rise in disciplines such as law and business2.

In his study, Convert also outlined that many students who were in the scientific stream in secondary education, chose not to study a scientific subject in higher education because they believed that their prospects of obtaining a degree were better in any non-scientific discipline than in sciences. This is mainly due to two factors: the high school students‟ perception that scientific subjects are difficult, and the employment-based portrayals of science subjects regarding them as less „profitable‟ today than other disciplines in terms of job quality and pay levels. These factors have determined that students that had originally prepared for a science-based course at tertiary level rejected a scientific career in favour of disciplines they regarded as both less difficult and more „profitable‟, such as economics, law or medicine, while other students chose disciplines such as social science or humanities, which they regarded to be less „profitable‟ but with a high prospect of obtaining a qualification.

The emergence of the same symptoms in a number of European countries is now a major concern for education authorities and has seized the attention of the media. Many initiatives have been developed throughout the European Union to carry out innovative teaching experiments from primary school upwards3,4,5,6.

In this context, the goal of the project we propose is twofold: on one hand it aims at strengthening the links between secondary schools and universities creating reservoirs of talents, on the other hands it pretends to develop new teaching practices based on the constructivist approach aimed at reinforcing basic science knowledge at the secondary school level and at improving teaching quality and students‟ comprehension at the higher education level, thus demystifying, with engaging and dynamic classes, the preconceived idea among the students that science and technologies are difficult subjects.

The cornerstone of this empiric approach is a network of distributed plug & play on-line laboratories and virtual experiments targeted to both secondary school and higher education curricula. The goal of NEWTON is hence the development of the core hardware/software technology to create an open and scalable platform that can seamlessly manage plug & play virtual and remote labs maintained by the academic partners of this initiative. The system is designed to be easily scalable and reconfigurable by providing a virtualization environment to support plug & play labs over the web. To achieve this goal we plan to use a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) based on web services or related

1 Convert, B., “Europe and the Crisis in Scientific Vocations,” European Journal of education, 40(4), 2005.

2 Source National Center for Education Statistics, Department of Education, USA

3 ASPECT, Supported by the European Commission under the eContentplus programme: http://aspect.eun.org/

4 iTEC, Supported by the European Commission under the FP7 programme: http://itec.eun.org

5 ITEMS, Integrated Teaching e-Learning Modules: http://itemspro.net/

6 SPICE - Creating a Science Pedagogy Innovation Centre for Europe, funded under the European Commission’s

Lifelong Learning Programme (DG Education and Culture).

technologies such as Jini7 or Rio8 as the core development platform. In addition, to provide our system with the capability to support rich media contents over the web we plan to use new and promising technologies such as HTML5, WebGL 9 , WebM 10 , or CubicVR 3D engine11. The distributed architecture we describe in this proposal is aimed at:

1. Supporting high-school students in their physics and mathematics curricula.

2. Introducing high-school students to modern ICT technologies.

3. Supporting university students in their ICT curricula focused to wireless communication technologies with special emphasis on wireless sensor networks, digital broadcasting technologies and multimedia, and radio-frequency circuit and system design.

As far as we are concerned, a platform or learning environment which combines into a unique framework the target audience, the technological characteristics, the target subjects, and the teaching approach of NEWTON is still missing so far. With this large scale pilot we pretend to fill this gap and to reach an audience as broad as possible.

The key drivers in the development of this platform are:

1. Pedagogical innovation – The new educational models that are now wide spreading are based on the constructivist approach, i.e. on the use of experimentation to understand and solve concrete problems. The new teaching paradigm privileges all of those methods that facilitate the learning of theoretical concepts, but also strengthen skills such as creativity, self-learning, research, and teamwork. In this new context social constructivist models are of particular interest.

2. Technological innovation – The new educational and teaching paradigm can benefit from ICT technologies not only to improve content and course management, but also to develop novel learning support techniques.

3. Learning platforms – Learning Management Systems (LMSs) and Virtual Learning

Environments (VLEs) allow the classroom to extend onto the web and create new teaching and learning scenarios.

4. Innovation on educational contents – The change driven by LMS/VLEs wide spreading

is prompting the demand for a higher level of interaction among teacher and students as well as teaching models in which the students are no longer recipients of knowledge but, with the help of the teacher, build their own knowledge on what they already know. In this context, virtual and remote laboratories are a powerful tool that extends the capabilities of the available LMS/VLEs, and reinforce and validate the theoretical concepts shown in the classroom. In addition, user-generated contents and shared resources will be a valuable support for teachers during the class and for students during self-learning.

5. Transformation of the learning spaces – The new ICT and Web technologies allow ubiquitous access to remote resources and information overcoming time and space

barriers. In this new context, the learning process goes beyond the physical constraints

of the classroom. In particular the impact or increased potential for self-learning outside of the classroom, to share opinions with peers of other countries, and to experiment

anytime from anywhere will be key factors here.

6. Teachers’ education – The new educational paradigm is prompting a change in the way classes are given. In the new model teacher role will change, being interactive and rooted in negotiation rather than in authority. ICT technologies will be of fundamental importance in this transformation process, offering to the educators a valuable support to achieve the educational goals in all the learning scenarios. However, even if teachers

7 Project web-page: http://www.jini.org/

8 Project web-page: http://www.rio-project.org/

9 Project web-page: http://www.khronos.org/webgl/

10 Project web-page: http://www.webmproject.org/

11 Project web-page: http://www.cubicvr.org/

are positive about using technology, sometimes they are limited by the quality of assistance and the quality of training on the new pedagogical approaches. To tackle these problems, new approaches for the development of the new teaching skills will be required.

7. Assessment – Teachers use to be reluctant at the moment of changing summative assessment approaches; nonetheless, the new ICT technologies has disclosed the possibility to implement new formative assessment practices in which monitoring the learning process is a responsibility shared between student and teacher. The new technologies allow self-testing, instant feedback, as well performance and progress tracking. These data can be used by either students or teachers to monitor individual or global achievements.

NEWTON has 6 technological R&D objectives targeted to implement the software and hardware infrastructure to support the large scale pilots:

1. To select and validate the technologies to provide our system with the possibility to support seamless integration of plug & play virtual and distributed remote labs while assuring system scalability, maintainability and serviceability.

2. To select the technologies (tools, learning platforms, services, plug-ins, security, etc.) to implement the platform software interface for the virtual and distributed lab.

3. To design, test, and implement the network of plug & play distributed and fabrication

labs, using the technologies evaluated in points (1) and (2), providing the hardware with a software abstraction layer to interact with the application.

4. To design, test, and implement the augmented reality layer and the supporting hardware for students‟ laboratory training.

5. To seamlessly integrate the web-based applications, tools and learning systems into a standard platform like, for example, IMS LTI (Learning Tools Interoperability).

6. To develop experiments and contents for the platform as well as a suite of validation

and test protocols.

Beside these technological and research objectives, there are also a set of specific objectives that give to our project a high added value. NEWTON goes beyond the mere technical development and pretends to develop also a set of good teaching practices to take full advantage of the great potential of the ICT technologies on which the proposed platform relies. More specifically, NEWTON also pretends:

1. To develop specific teaching and learning activities for high school curricula aimed at improving the understanding of physics and mathematics as well as their specific application to modern ICT technologies with particular emphasis on communications, wireless networks, wireless systems, and digital broadcasting technologies.

2. To develop specific teaching and learning activities for university and higher-education curricula targeted to teaching of ICT technologies with particular emphasis on communications, wireless networks, wireless systems, and digital broadcasting technologies.

3. To foment cooperation and collaboration among the students of the partner universities and of the associated partners universities, as well as those of the associated high

schools, in the context of the new social constructivist model.

4. To develop, refine, and validate a range of pre-pilot teaching and learning scenarios based on the aimed at easing students comprehension through empirical experience

and research.

5. To design and develop a set of virtual and real laboratories to support the scenarios defined in the previous point.

6. To evaluate the potential of mobile ubiquitous access to assist educators during tuition and progress monitoring, and augmented-reality techniques to assist and train the students during laboratory sessions.