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Increasing the Effectiveness of K-12 Stem Worshops Through Targeted Context and Creative Technolgies
Get PDFEconomic projections reveal a need for one million more Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) professionals over the next decade than the United States is producing at the current rate. As a result, STEM education is a major focus of recent legislation and funding in Congress as the number of STEM professionals is inadequate to support innovation and the ever-changing economy. In response to the urgent need for more competitive STEM professionals, there has been a widespread implementation of workshops, organizations, and school programs aimed at amplifying K-12 student STEM literacy and interest. Some programs are even created to specifically reach and attract women and unrepresented minorities to STEM. Despite the increase in outreach programs, they remain limited to a straightforward discussion of a narrow scope of STEM topics. Many workshops and programs continue to validate the positive impacts of utilizing hands-on projects but cease to inform about broader STEM applications through the exploration and integration of storytelling, culture, and community.
Professors and students from the Liberal Art and Engineering Studies program at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo founded the Seeds in STEM organization to develop K-12 STEM workshops that incorporate a participants’ culture and community in the learning process per a storyline that guides the participants through several STEM activities. This paper discusses the impact of adding a workshop activity that introduces motion capture technologies and their application to the Seeds in STEM workshop held on April 30th, 2022. The results collected from the activity via three forms of assessment demonstrate generally positive trends in the attitudes of the participants regarding STEM topics and the careers encompassed by STEM
In-Situ Defect Detection Using Acoustic Vibration Monitoring for Additive Manufacturing Processes
Get PDFThe world of additive manufacturing revolves around speed and repeatability. Inherently, the process of 3D printing is plagued with variability that fluctuates with every material and parameter modification. Without proper qualification standards, processes can never become stable enough to produce parts that may be used in aerospace, medical, and construction industries. These industries rely on high quality metrics in order to protect the lives of those who may benefit from them. To establish trust in a process, all points of variation must be controlled and accounted for every part produced. In instances where even the best process controls are enacted, there still may be situational unknowns that can cause detrimental defects, often on micron scales.
Through in-situ monitoring techniques, such as visual or acoustic monitoring, a secondary level of quality assessment can be performed. This type of real time monitoring solution can be used in a variety of ways to help reduce scrap rate, increase overall quality, and improve the mechanical characteristics of a newly developing material. In this proposal, a goal was set to develop a system that can be a low-cost alternative to a comparable acoustic monitoring system. This design is meant to be a low fidelity concept that can alert a user of any potential anomalies within a build by detecting spikes in acoustic emissions.
The overall success of this experiment is set on two conditions. First, the new low-cost system should be mountable on various types of machines. Second, this system should demonstrate some level of equivalency to a similar system. These two situations were successfully met as the system was able to provide indications of anomalies present within a build. The system was calibrated and tuned to be able to measure signals on a SLM 125 running 316L powder. Minor modifications to the code and system can make it adaptable to different types of equipment such as CNC’s, bandsaws, casting processes, and other advanced manufacturing equipment. The model can be attenuated to support higher or lower frequencies as well as different types of acoustic sensors, which demonstrates the vast potential that this system can provide for detecting different types of defects
Patterns of Academic Help-Seeking in Undergraduate Computing Students
Get PDFKnowing when and how to seek academic help is crucial to the success of undergraduate computing students. While individual help-seeking resources have been studied, little is understood about the factors influencing students to use or avoid certain re- sources. Understanding students’ patterns of help-seeking can help identify factors contributing to utilization or avoidance of help resources by different groups, an important step toward improving the quality and accessibility of resources. We present a mixed-methods study investigating the help-seeking behavior of undergraduate computing students. We collected survey data (n = 138) about students’ frequency of using several resources followed by one-on-one student interviews (n = 15) to better understand why they use those resources. Several notable patterns were found. Women sought help in office hours more frequently than men did and computing majors sought help from their peers more often than non-computing majors. Additionally, interview data revealed a common progression in which students started from easily accessible but low utility resources (online sources and peers) before moving on to less easily accessible, high utility resources (like instructor office hours). Finally, while no differences between racial groups was observed, the lack of diversity in our sample limits these findings
Viability and Implementation of a Vector Cryptography Extension for Risc-V
Get PDFRISC-V is an open-source instruction-set architecture (ISA) forming the basis of thousands of commercial and experimental microprocessors. The Scalar Cryptography extension ratified in December 2021 added scalar instructions that target common hashing and encryption algorithms, including SHA2 and AES. The next step forward for the RISC-V ISA in the field of cryptography and digital security is the development of vector cryptography instructions.
This thesis examines if it is viable to add vector implementations of existing RISC-V scalar cryptography instructions to the existing vector instruction format, and what improvements they can make to the execution of SHA2 and AES algorithms. Vector cryptography instructions vaeses, vaesesm, vaesds, vaesdsm, vsha256sch, and vsha256hash are proposed to optimize AES encryption and decryption, SHA256 message scheduling, and SHA256 hash rounds, with pseudocode, assembly examples, and a full 32-bit instruction format for each. Both algorithms stand to benefit greatly from vector instructions in reduction of computation time, code length, and instruction memory utilization due to large operand sizes and frequently repeated functions. As a proof of concept for the vector cryptography operations proposed, a full vector-based AES-128 encryption and SHA256 message schedule generation are performed on the 32-bit RISC-V Ibex processor and 128-bit Vicuna Vector Coprocessor in the Vivado simulation environment. Not counting stores or loads for fair comparison, the new Vector Cryptography extension completes a full encryption round in a single instruction compared to sixteen with the scalar extension, and can generate eight SHA256 message schedule double-words in a single instruction compared to the forty necessary on the scalar extension. These represent a 93.75% and 97.5% reduction in required instructions and memory for these functions respectively, at a hardware cost of 19.4% more LUTs and 1.44% more flip-flops on the edited Vicuna processor compared to the original