Scientia Lab of Future

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SCIENTIA LAB OF FUTURE


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TABLE OF CONTENTS

1.Table of contents

2.Abstract

3.Introduction

4.The need for Scientia

5.Materials and Methods

5.1.The online platform

5.2.The implementation

6.Results

7.Conclusion8.Acknowledgements

9.Bibliography

10.Annexes


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ABSTRACT

In a giant endeavor of defeating the Romanian agrestic poverty by sharing of

knowledge, Scientia Lab of Future desires to implement a futuristic way of teaching

experimental physics and chemistry.

With a well-trained crew and innovative software that, in the project stage, offers

us the view of a potential idealistic world in Romanian Education, our alternative to the

classic experiments might prove an economic, more efficient way to spread the sciences

even in the most remote schools of the rural part of the country.


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INTRODUCTION

Scientia Lab of Future is designed, now, as a project in its low stage ofdevelopment in practical area, a software that is designed to break the barriers that now

exist in Romanian education because of the huge gap between poor and rich families in

our countries.

Most often, even if the education is considered to be entirely free until the 10th

grade, the gap that lies between poverty and richness reflects substantially in the quality

of education the children receive. Of course, the quality in education is influenced,

indeed, by a lot of other adjacent factors, as would be political factors, fund

management or, the situation we try to eliminate the most, whether the school is incountryside, town or city.

The idea of this project came, initially, as an initiative of developing a device that

would help the countryside people of the most remote areas of our country and not

only to get access to a higher level of education in what regards physics and chemistry.

Of course, the project went further than we expected, and right now we are

facing the issue of creating a large enough platform to fit the needs of all the Romanian

schools, in this way our idea proving itself a money saver also, as, at the first look, to

supply a school with all scientific materials for one year is about 200$. Multiply thatwith 19000 and imagine that Scientia would require the materials of at most ten schools.

As students, two out of three of us got the chance to fight with the low quality

educational system of Romania, as our modest origins lie also in the countryside

(Coslogeni village, Calarasi County and Schela village, Galati County).


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Our mind is set on high goals, there is nothing that could stop us from evolving!

THE NEED FOR SCIENTIA

Of course, there is more than just our origin that led us to develop Scientia

platform. As it will be shown further, lately, the ministry of Education budget reached

the lowest value of the last 6 or 7 years. Nowadays, in Romania, there is a very delicate

situation and we are on the edge of national crisis. The average wage in our country is of

about 470$ and the minimum is as low as 197$, the medical wages are at most 882$ and

the highest degree in teaching is paid with 504$ so, right now, our country is

confronting with numerous strikes in both this sectors. The proper solution found was,

of course, cutting from Ministry of Education and Transportation Budget. So, now, we

find ourselves in the situation of trying to reduce the cost of education withoutcompromising any of its quality.


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Fig. 1

The budget for the

ministry of education inthe last six years

(expressed in kk €)

In our endeavor of getting an as objective as possible perspective of the problem,

we went back to the forgotten schools that we left in the 4th grade to observe the level of

teaching of experimental part of physics and chemistry in middle school.

The results didn’t lay waited:

Fig 2. Alexandru Oprea in Schela school Fig 3. Horia Culea in Schela school

This is two of us visiting and exploring the perspectives of “Lascar Catargiu”

school of Schela village, Galati county.


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Fig 4. Physics Lab of Schela school Fig 5. Experiment materials in Schela

School

As you can see, the very poor materials that Schela school has were not an

impediment in scheduling money for buying a modern laptop. So technology is what

we must rely on, forgetting about classical ways of experimenting.

Having the above situation explained, there is no doubt that we need a

standardized, national Centre developed for middle and high school student. As the

most schools prefer to invest in hi-tech devices, projectors, computers, smart boards

instead of basic materials, we consider a great idea am web space that can simulate with

real equipment experiments and that would allow to proper observation in real

experimental conditions, even better than what an usual physics lab can provide, having

high quality materials and analysts available more than 10 hours per day.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

Basically, what we’ll need for each experiment will be the experiment itself, the

IP camera connected directly to the internet(in this way we minimize the delay and the


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response time, reducing it from 30-35 seconds, as much it would provide any webcam,

to less than 2 seconds).

Each live-streamed experiment will be easily controlled by buttons on the website

and will be available to be watched by other users. After booking the place, you get a

ten minutes session where you can control entirely online the live streamed experiment.

1.THE ONLINE PLATFORM

The principle that we have used in developing our software is piece of

cake.

Practically, the login form checks in secured data based whether or not the

user that tries to enter the site is accredited by the Ministry of Education (as we

propose our project as an educational alternative).

The booking page allows you to enter to the experiment page, to watch as

a spectator the experiment demonstration or to book your time for controlling it.

Once you get in the experiment page, there will be 8 buttons which will allow

you to switch on or off each of the relays (for the current experiment, which is an

electrical circuit).

The site platform itself has been done mostly in HTML, combining this

with few elements of Adobe Muse for the design part.

The server that we use belongs to our school, as, coming to this contest

through them, we’ve been morally obliged to use the platform that it can offer.


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Fig 6. Part of the booking code

The experiment showed today is a simple electrical circuit with 6 bulbs and 4

switches (defined as relays) that, through an Arduino Board and an Ethernet Shield, is

connected to the computer and receives in real time commands from any device

connected to internet.

Fig 7. The scheme of the

electrical circuit shown today

In this particular

experiment, children can learn

a lot of things, starting with

strictly theoretical things, as

Ohm’s or Kirchhoff’s laws, topractical stuff, as the

inefficiency of putting two

switches in series or the

efficiency of a normal light

bulb(which is less than 3%!).

As mentioned before, this is mostly possible through an Arduino board, which

has been coded especially for this purpose.

Fig 8.


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Part of the Arduino code

which is used to check

connection to server.

For programming the

Arduino Board, we have

used the Official Software

Arduino downloaded

from arduino.cc.

The electric circuit

has been, of course, built by us entirely.


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Fig 9. Robert Lica and Alexandru Oprea Fig 10. Arduino and the relay

Fig 11.

The circuit

Fig 12.

Working

2.IMPLEMENTATION

Even if we sent our request for

implementing our project to most of the schools of our home villages and nearby,

popularizing our experiment through posters, flyers, business cards and so on,

we got the chance to apply it only in “Lascar Catargiu” school of Schela village

and the results were extremely pleasant.

Fig 13. First poster Fig 14. Second poster


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Fig 15. Business cards

Fig 16. Flyer

As we have been told from the teacher who teaches sciences in Schela School, as

soon as the project was set and ready to be used (it had been set during weekend so thestudents used it for 5 days, Monday-Friday), our project proved efficient both for

chemistry and physics, even if the physics had a better approach in our software.

In this discussion, we’ve also been put up on the disastrous dropout rate of

children in middle school and high school.


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Here you can see the percentage of

children who chose to abandon

school between 2005 and 2010

from each grade of primary and

middle school.

Fig 17. Dropout rate

Our project proved that children

are, in fact, interested in sciences, but the actual teaching method that we use is not

interesting enough to fascinate them. As soon as we combined science and technology,

the interest of children in science was reported to grow.

To thank us for sharing our project with their school, the principal helped us to

promote our project further.


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Fig 18.

Proof of the success of

Scientia

The school also guaranteed that they will look to develop, in this way, their own

software if the Ministry of Education will do nothing in this sense.

Translated version:


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In this way, our great

amount of work has beenremunerated.

Fig 19. Legally translated copy


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RESULTS

The implementation of the project in Schela School was more than a challenge to

us, as we were not simply asked to show the students how the software works and

guide them, but we were also involved in creating a user-friendly interface that can be

simply used without generating any bug or headache.

The appreciation that has been given to us from the principal encourages us to

continue to follow the steps for spreading our project throughout all the Romanian

Educational System.

Children were reported to be more interested in Physics, do their homework and

to have summed, totally, less 11 absences in all the three grades of secondary school

where physics is taught(totally 95 children, 6 lessons, 190 possible absences), reported to

the usual number which is 25 per week.

All these results conclude that our project is, without doubt, a success.


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CONCLUSION

The success of implementation of our project in this early stage will not

overwhelm us, as we realize, now, how much work will have to be done to set all the

country up for virtual experiments.

We do not lose our courage.

We are ready to fight, with statistics and graphs, to prove to everybody how

efficient would our system be.Equipping Scientia instead of equipping every school in this country will lead to

significantly economies.

Fig 20.

Scientia vs regular schools

Of course, the price paid for each school will be multiplied by 19000. Here is the

huge economy that Scientia provides. In this way, we hope to have created an efficient,

cheap and interesting way to involve even the last child in this country in science!


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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to express our sincere thanks to the following:

1.Ali Cabas, the one who never forgot us and helped us with patience andprofessionalism

2.Sedat Dinc, the wonderful teacher and parent who guided us through all the

project and helped us to improve and develop it

3.Alexandru Oprea’s grandmother, Oprea Zoica, who helped us with the

bureaucracy of implementing the project in Schela School

4.“Lascar Catargiu” School of Schela and its principal

5.International Computer High School of Constanta, who supported us in each of

our ideas

6.Altair Net S.R.L. and Catalin, who sponsored us with IP cameras and a lot ofother useful stuff


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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Websites:

1.w3schools.com

2.wikipedia.com

3.php.net4.arduino.cc

5.tutorialspoint.com

Books:

1.IP Address Management Principles and Practice , by Timothy Rooney

2.Arduino for Dummies, by John Nussey

3.Information Science and Application, by Kuinam J. Kim

4.Copii care nu merg la scoala (Children who don’t go to school), UNICEF Study

5.Automation for Robotics, by Luc Jaulin

6.Alternative Education, by Yoshiyuki Nagata

7.Hows and whys of alternative education, by Darlene Leiding


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ANNEXES

(fig 21. Parts in our website)


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Thank you for reading the documentation of our project, Scientia Lab of Future!

Best regards from:

Alexandru Oprea Robert Lica Horia Culea

Documents

Scientia Lab of Future