Improving STEM Retention through Hands-on Implementation and Red-teaming: A Pilot Curriculum for Congested Communications and Electronic Warfare
Abstract
The Navy and Marine Corps require a growing workforce with electronicwarfare (EW) knowledge and experience, but EW is largely untaught inacademia and insufficiently addressed by commercial industry. The University of Notre Dame (UND) proposes to create a Science, Technology, Engineering, andMathematics (STEM) pathway around congested communications and EW usingstate-of-the-art pedagogical techniques. Specifically, the team will incorporate realistic scenarios, hands-on implementation, and red-teaming into an existing third-year communication systems course and disseminate the lecture material and laboratory software. Through a collaboration with NSWC Crane, the NAVSEA Center of Excellence for Electronic Warfare, UND studentsin Department of Electrical Engineering (EE) and Navy ROTC program will beexposed to real-world problems as well as Navy STEM professionals and theircareers, and the course will be transferred via NWSC Crane to providecontinuing education opportunities at Navy warfare centers and laboratories.Applying best practices in educational assessment, the team will study theeffectiveness of this approach at growing undergraduate student interest,confidence, and understanding toward student retention and careers pursuitswithin this specific STEM pathway and offer suggestions for enhancing STEMpathways toward Navy S&T careers more generally. The modified course willpresent congested communications and EW as a means of revealing andexploiting weaknesses in wireless communications waveforms. From thisperspective EW is not simply tacked on at the end of an existingcommunications course, it becomes an integral part of the entire curriculum.In additional to the rigorous theoretical foundation, laboratory exercisesbased on a multi-element phased array driven by software defined radios(SDR) will provide hands-on experience to apply the theory and buildconfidence in the practical application of the material. Student teams willengage in a capstone laboratory in which a naval-relevant scenario will beposed by and mentored by the subject-matter experts from NSWC Crane. Thecurriculum and laboratory setup will be available and packaged for easy andlow-cost deployment to academic and government institutions (per Navypreference). The UND is requesting $735,830 over three years to developcurriculum and laboratory modules, pilot the course, evaluate coursesuccess, and transfer the course to Crane as a demonstration of how thecourse can be deployed to other Navy centers and institutions. We will alsodocument and present the course material and assessment results at relevantworkshops and conferences.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Sep 04, 2018
- Source ID
- N000141812734
Entities
People
- J. Nicholas Laneman
Organizations
- Office of Naval Research
- United States Navy
- University of Notre Dame