This article showcases STEM as an interdisciplinary field in which the disciplines strengthen and support each other (not as separate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines). The authors focus on an open-ended, complex problem—water quality—as the primary teaching and learning task. The participants, middle school female students (aged 9–15 years), interacted in an informal educational setting (i.e., Girl Scouts) on a research project investigating river quality following the river’s restoration. The community, including Girl Scout participants, leaders, parents, university faculty, graduate students, and others, utilized an action research (AR) approach when interacting with the participants. Methods such as observational field notes, focus groups, and collected artifacts were commonly employed. The authors describe the history of STEM and AR leading to authentic science research projects through eight engineering skills/practices (incorporating science, technology, and mathematics) and showcase participant interactions, implementation, and community engagement in the STEM water quality river project. Findings indicate that informal engineering based projects can serve as opportunities for participants to connect with integrated STEM. Implications include the need for engaging participants in informal authentic science to support traditional school STEM learning and encouraging community engagement in integrated STEM to support traditional K-12 classroom instruction.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), referenced as drones, have advanced to consumer adoption for hobby and business use. Due to this increased availability in drone technology other sectors of the economy such as infrastructure technology, security mechanisms, and resource deliveries have begun to implement drones in their own operations. Following the consumer and private sectors demand for better iterations of the product, increasingly more complex tasks will become possible due to the advances in hardware. These tasks increase the potential impacts that drones will have on applications such as smart cities, modern cities which have fully adopted technology in order to enhance daily operations as well as the welfare of its citizens. These cities are being designed to consist of mostly static mesh networks of sensors, but can contain dynamic aspects as well, including both ground and air-based autonomous vehicles.When devising networked computation devices for use in a smart city, safety should be of paramount concern. In an attempt to meet these high standards of security, services and devices should be implemented with security protocols in mind during every stage of development. Given the large number of sensors, autonomous vehicles, and other advancements, a smart city necessitates this level of security. The SHARKS protocol (Secure, Heterogeneous, Autonomous, and Rotational Knowledge for Swarms) ensures this kind of security by allowing for new applications for UAV swarm technology. Enabling drones to circle a target without centralized control or selecting lead agents, the SHARKS protocol performs organized movement among agents without creating a central point of vulnerability. Through comparisons on the stability of the protocol in different settings, experiments demonstrate the efficiency and capacity of the SHARKS protocol as a potential solution for future smart cities.

This study compares three pre-collegiate teacher professional learning and development (PLD) integrated science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) experiences framed in astronomy. The study is set in the western United States (USA) and involves 60 pre-collegiate teachers (in the USA these are K-12 teachers) over the course of three years (June 2014–May 2017). During the PLDs, astronomy acted as a vehicle for pre-collegiate STEM teachers to increase their STEM content knowledge as well as create and implement integrated STEM classroom lessons. The authors collected quantitative and qualitative data to address five research questions and embraced social constructionism as the theoretical framework. Findings show that STEM pre-collegiate teachers are largely engaged with integrated STEM PLD content and embrace astronomy content and authentic science. Importantly, they need time to practice, interpret, translate, and use the integrated STEM content in classroom lessons. Recommendations for PLD STEM teacher support are provided. Implications of this study are vast, as gaps in authentic science, utilizing astronomy, PLD structure, and STEM integration are ripe for exploration.

The emergence and proliferation of Smart Cards and other security-centric technologies require ongoing advancement in secure-IC design. We propose advanced IC protection from Differential Power Analysis attack though a hybrid-logic style based on Complementary Pass-transistor and Dynamic and Differential Logic (DDL) in conjunction with a synthesis methodology based on Reduced Ordered Binary Decision Diagrams. We demonstrate the capabilities of our logic cell and compare it with Wave Dynamic Differential Logic, and the traditional Standard Complementary Logic (SCMOS). Experimental results on a DES layout show significant reduction in area (43%) and total power (50%) and near constant power consumption in every cycle when compared to existing DDL styles at a speed penalty (20%) against SCMOS.

There is a clear call for pre-collegiate students in the United States to become literate in computer science (CS) concepts and practices through integrated, authentic experiences and instruction. Yet, a majority of in-service and pre-service pre-collegiate teachers (instructing children aged five to 18) lack the fundamental skills and self-efficacy to adequately and effectively integrate CS into existing curricula. In this study, 30 pre-collegiate teachers who represent a wide band of experience, grade-levels, and prior CS familiarity participated in a 16-day professional development (PD) course to enhance their content knowledge and self-efficacy in integrating CS into existing lessons and curricula. Using both qualitative and quantitative methodology, a social constructivist approach guided the researchers in the development of the PD, as well as the data collection and analysis on teacher content knowledge and perceptions through a mixed-methods study. Ultimately, participants were introduced to CS concepts and practices through NetLogo, which is a popular multi-agent simulator. The results show that although the pre-collegiate teachers adopted CS instruction, the CS implementation within their curricula was limited to the activities and scope of the PD with few adaptations and minimal systemic change in implementation behaviors.

Twenty-three pre-collegiate educators of elementary students (ages 5-10 years) and secondary students (ages 11-18 years) attended a two-week science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) astronomy focused professional development in the summer of 2015 with activities focused on authentic science experiences, inquiry, and partnership building. ‘Authentic’ in this research refers to scientific skills and are defined. The study explores the authentic science education experience of the pre-collegiate educators, detailing the components of authentic science as seen through a social constructionism lens. Using qualitative and quantitative methods, the researchers analyzed the successes and challenges of pre-collegiate science and mathematics educators when immersed in STEM and astronomy authentic science practices, the educators’ perceptions before and after the authentic science practices, and the educators’ performance on pre to post content tests during the authentic science practices. Findings show that the educators were initially engaged, then disengaged, and then finally re-engaged with the authentic experience. Qualitative responses are shared, as are the significant results of the quantitative pre to post content learning scores of the educators. Conclusions include the necessity for PD team delivery of detailed explanations to the participants - before, during, and after – for the entire authentic science experience and partnership building processes. Furthermore, expert structure and support is vital for participant research question generation, data collection, and data analysis (successes, failures, and reattempts). Overall, in order to include authentic science in pre-collegiate classrooms, elementary and secondary educators need experience, instruction, scaffolding, and continued support with the STEM processes. Key words: authentic science, astronomy outreach, inquiry activities, partnership building, professional development, STEM education.