Upper St. Clair students explore practical solutions to real-life problems
On Sept. 28, Upper St. Clair School District temporarily lost its ability to connect to the Internet.
“That day was basically out of commission for all the remote students,” said Lillian Vasilko, who was among those who have been learning from home during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“If you can’t have the Internet, you can’t access your class and you won’t be able to do your classes, talk to teachers or any of that.”
Lillian and two classmates came up with a potential solution as a project in their STEAM Innovation and Consulting course at the high school. They and three other teams of students gave presentations about their projects Nov. 6 in a session conducted virtually this year for the first time.
“This is great that you’re here and showing support for these students,” teacher Fred Peskorski said, greeting school administrators and other observers. “They’ve worked hard on these projects in these weird times, so this extra bit of support and feedback from you is really important, not only for them, but it also is going to help me figure out how to help these students do a better job on subsequent presentations.”
Students’ assignments are to develop feasible plans as solutions to real-life problems, including how to mitigate disruptions in education during Internet outages. Other three-person teams addressed issues within the high school such as setting up dedicated meeting space for administrators, and organizing the technological education storage room and developing an inventory system for the items inside.
Protocol for Internet outages
Lillian and the other members of her team, Sujay Banerjee and Shilp Shah, talked with high school principal Timothy Wagner about potential solutions, among them the possibilities of using prerecorded lectures and holding classes at night.
A more practical approach led the students to consider the use of mobile WiFi hotspots that could provide connectivity if the district’s system is incapacitated. Their research led them to wireless provider Kajeet Inc., and the students talked with a company sales representative and technology solutions manager about the possibility.
Kajeet’s SmartSpot product, according to the company, offers students “guaranteed access to their school’s online learning materials and instruction through a portable, all-in-one device. Schools can manage devices with data sharing and customizable filters to save on cost without compromising quality or student privacy.”
The cost of each device is around $100, and an accompanying data plan is $15 per gigabyte, the team reported. Coverage would be necessary for about 70 classrooms.
Part of the project was establishing a protocol for use of the devices.
“It’s quite simple, because it should be a simple solution,” Lillian said. “Once the Wi-Fi goes out, as it did in September, we contact the remote students first via email, and then the teachers will proceed to connect to the SmartSpot. Once you’re connected and everything’s stable, you join with the remote students.”
A possibility is that the devices could be made available for checkout by students and faculty members, to provide Internet access in places with iffy connectivity.
“The really nice thing about that is it does open up the possibility of having more outdoor classroom space, which I know a lot of teachers would enjoy,” Peskorski said following the team’s presentation.
“Potentially, you could be paying for this data plan and this equipment for something that never happens. But if you have this ability to use it in another way,” he added, “that offsets that insurance sort of cost.”
Conference room design
High school administrators often are without a dedicated space to hold meetings. Recently, space has opened up in an area close to their offices that can be configured as a conference room.
Developing a design and specifications were STEAM Innovation and Consulting students Nate Paul, Ryan Sarkett and Tori Slagle, who were assigned to work within a budget of $20,000.
They started by interviewing assistance principals Daniel Beck and Daniel Zelenski, plus school district maintenance manager Dan Snyder, about needs, wants and logistics.
“We used their feedback to ultimately help us decide how the room was going to look and where it was going to be,” Tori said. “We also asked everyone we interviewed to possibly give us a pros-and-cons list of the current conference room, so that we could compare the current one versus what the new one would look like.”
The students emerged with a three-dimensional model, complete with renderings of furniture and amenities, incorporating the suggestions of the administrators and considering the viewpoints of “district stakeholders” including school board members and local taxpayers.
“The first and the really dominant expense in this project would be the walls and the new construction that needs to go up,” Ryan said. “To find this, it wasn’t really feasible to invite anybody into the school for a quote. We did call several companies, and we kind of described what our project was all about and gave them the dimensions. And they gave us a pretty rough estimate of what a typical project like this would take.”
Overall, the team’s total cost estimate is slightly more than $15,000, well below the budgeted amount.
Along with use by administrators, the conference room conceivably could serve as a place for students in various organizations to gather as an alternative to the library or cafeteria.
“I think it’s good to have a middle-ground space where you can do group work and still have a quiet atmosphere,” Nate said.
Technology education
storage room
Anyone who regularly battles closet or garage clutter can envision the storage space between two technology education rooms at Upper St. Clair High School, which never has been fully organized and properly managed.
For their STEAM Innovation and Consulting project, Dom Alford-Egizio, Raam Diora and Carlie Hewitt examined ways to help teachers and students stop wasting time looking for equipment and materials that pretty much are stored at random.
One aspect of their solution is to categorize the inventory as being used most frequently either by teachers or students, and to separate the items and arrange them accordingly.
“We also looked at materials that were most used and least used,” Carlie said. “We did this in order to find materials that we should keep or not. It was also useful when we were looking to organize the storage room and where we should put them.”
The students presented photographs of the room taken before and after they reorganized it, explaining that they took into consideration interviews with Peskorski and faculty colleague Seth Williams, along with setups they saw during visits to hardware stores. The resulting “final product” shows considerable improvement in terms of placement and use of space.
Also, the team developed a spreadsheet key to indicate the location of items on shelves, with a hard copy posted in the storage room and a Google Docs version available online.
While reorganizing, the students left some shelves open for supplies that arrive in the future.
“There are some things in there still that we don’t probably need or are outdated,” Peskorski said. “So I think that we’re likely to even clean up more space than what you have set aside.”
Inventory management
Meanwhile, accounting for exactly what is located within the technology education storage area also could use improvement, especially with regard to ordering new items.
“The problem with the current system is that it’s not being organized in a way that could maximize accuracy. It is difficult to decide which supplies are needed and, more specifically, shortages or any oversupplies each year,” student Haley Qin said. “It is unreliable and it is susceptible to a lot of human error, especially since it’s still manual and it’s done once a year.”
She joined classmates Parth Patel and Kyle Ralyea in exploring a more effective approach, deciding on a method by which the borrowing, returning and adding of inventory can be logged through the free online survey tool Google Forms. Users would type in designated barcodes for items, along with quantities.
“The solution also saves money because it does not cost any money, in comparison with some of the possible ideas that were brainstormed and were not chosen,” Kyle said.
He said his team would prefer to implement dropdown menus instead of having barcode information entered manually, but time limitations prevented that avenue from being pursued thoroughly.
The overall process as described, though, does incorporate QR – “quick response” – codes for expedient access to online inventory forms from smartphones.
“This has a lot of potential to really be super-helpful for us,” Peskorski said about the team’s efforts, “and I’m probably going to hand this off to a team or a student in my advanced engineering class to carry on with your good work here.”