This project was proposed in response to the DDI SFC Beacon Open Call for “COVID-19 Response & Accelerating Economic and Social Recovery in Edinburgh & South East Scotland” projects. The proposal was submitted on 11/12/20 and was approved by DDI on 16/12/20.
The project is response to the impacts of COVID on our IoT in Schools programme and school education itself. The main objective of the project is to deliver effective distance learning in data and Internet of Things at scale to primary and secondary schools across the South East Scotland City Deal region.
The IOT in Schools infrastructure rollout has been delayed by around a year due to the impacts of COVID-19affecting supply chains and the schools’ ability to engage with the project.
This project will create a virtual simulated DataTown, which will be presented to learners and teachers on the project website. DataTown will initially have around 20 different virtual sensors with live and historic data for each. The data is generated from physical modelling algorithms and typical historic data from similar sensing and supported by experts across the University.
DataTown rests on the eastern seaboard of Scotland and is built around a harbour. It has two primary schools and a secondary school. A river running through originates from a loch with a hydro-electric plant above the town. The town has one main thoroughfare, a source of problems to solve, including pollution and safe routes to school.
The lesson guides will encourage real-life problem solving through PPDAC, using live virtual sensor datasets. Virtual sensor datasets allow learners and teachers to go beyond the original IOT project design to experience additional activities, for example, climate-related weather events, and economics around sustainable energy generation and traffic management around air quality in town centres. These events are triggered to occur at particular times so that learners can see the effects coming through in “live” data, something that cannot reliably be achieved from live datasets gathered in schools.
The output from the project will be a novel distance learning platform for simulated IoT-based data education enabling us to engage our regional schools earlier than would otherwise be possible given the impacts of COVID-19. This new platform will support the development of STEM data skills across primary, special and secondary school sectors, as well as University/College and adult learning. It can also serve as the basis for research into “digital twinning” and physical model simulation, and has the potential to evolve into a commercial product/service.
Current project status
Report Date | RAG | Budget | Effort Completed | Effort to complete |
---|---|---|---|---|
August 2021 | BLUE | 0.0 days | 0.0 days | 0.0 |