SBIR-STTR Award

This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will develop an easy to use internet-of-things (IoT) platform, called "Bluebird", for use in K-12 Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) education. This project will employ a craft-oriented approach to STEM education, which breaks down gender barriers and engages students from diverse backgrounds. It is estimated that 65% of primary school children will grow up to work in jobs that do not yet exist. This new workforce will be the result of what is being referred to as the "fourth industrial revolution", brought on by a fusion of technologies in the physical, digital, and biological spheres. The goal of this project is to develop an ecosystem of IoT technologies that prepare students for these industries. The platform to be developed will disrupt the current commercial landscape by providing an affordable and student-friendly alternative to devices which are either expensive or overly challenging for beginners to adopt. The resulting product platform will serve the global smart education and learning market, which is expected to grow to $586 billion by 2021. The intellectual merit of this project is to develop a "smart" education tool that will enable educators and learners to control the ways in which technology shapes their lives. This innovation will eliminate the major hurdles that create conceptual, practical, and economic barriers for students to gain literacy of information networks and human-centered design. To achieve this goal, the team will research and develop a platform and an easy-to-use device that overcomes the technical challenges of providing IoT experiences in the classroom, where wireless internet is often unreliable, and the security and privacy of students must be safeguarded. The key objectives for this project are 1) to develop a classroom-ready framework for IoT including curriculum that adheres to educational mandates; 2) to design and build low-cost and low-power hardware, firmware, and protocols for the platform; and 3) to design and implement a mobile application to facilitate communications and programming. The anticipated result of this research is a platform that provides K-12 classroom access to IoT tools and skills. The design and manufacture of this project opens up a new market as Bluebird users craft their own IoT ideas, products, and services.

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project develops a low-cost gateway for hands-on exploration and advances knowledge of Internet of things (IoT) fundamentals for educators and learners. The overarching goal of the project is to transform the current STEM landscape with an alternative, future-forward approach to designing connected devices, and to introduce a wide range of students to creative applications of complex technologies. Cyber-physical systems - commonly referred to as the Internet of things - are paving new information pathways and will soon become the foundation of all trades from medicine to publishing. These concepts need to be taught in a STEM curriculum but today are rarely even mentioned in a K-12 classroom. The end-product will help fulfill the NSF mission of preparing youth to lead scientific innovation and hold successful careers by building the technologies of the future. This Phase II project develops an unparalleled educational tool enabling users to build simple yet full-cycle IoT systems. The product exposes the underlying architecture of IoT and leads users through the concepts of electronics, collaborative coding, data security, and social impact. The main technical innovations are: 1) the design of small footprint, low-cost hardware with onboard communications components; and 2) the accompanying software platform that supports collaborative coding with multiple networked devices, while maintaining the highest level of security and privacy features to protect student data. Currently, IoT systems in the EdTech market have several layers of custom-built technology and outdated components. This project offers widely accessible hardware and software IoT building blocks with full functionality. Students will devise projects that activate objects remotely by giving them attributes, emotions, and behaviors. Additionally, they will gain awareness of the social implications of their projects, as they consider how the objects' attributes change and respond within the scope of a network and invent cause-and-effect interactions in an end-to-end IoT system.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.