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THEME: Engaging students in STEM education BACKGROUND AND AIMS In recent years, many schools have developed Makerspaces as a means of fostering students’ STEM-related knowledge and skills. Typically, activities in these spaces involve students in practical work designing and creating artefacts, models and mock ups responding to problems, needs and opportunities, often working collaboratively using a range of materials, tools and equipment. Much literature associates these activities with developing STEM discipline conceptual knowledge and a variety of so-called ‘21St Century’ competencies such as problem solving, critical and creative thinking, teamwork, communication and other social skills.
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In Australia, employers are allowed to become accredited training providers and award qualifications to their own workers. This is not unique to Australia – there is provision for this to happen in the UK as well, although it is rarely taken up – but it is not known how widespread the practice is among countries. There are around 250 employers in Australia who have become what is known as ‘Enterprise Registered Training Organisations’ (RTOs, the Australian term for nationally-accredited training providers), and they are drawn from both public and private sectors. They become enterprise RTOs because they want more customisation of training and more control over delivery (Enterprise RTO Association, 2009a); and because they want to improve quality in their production and service processes, and to develop their workforces (Smith & Smith, 2009a). The phenomenon of enterprise RTOs has been little explored, and a major national research project, funded by the Australia Research Council, set out to map the current terrain, examine how enterprise RTOs operate, and to explore questions of training quality and comparability with qualifications delivered through institutional training providers. A partnership was set up with the Enterprise Training Organisation Association and eight enterprise RTOs, in a project with qualitative and quantitative phases including longitudinal case studies in the enterprise RTOs and two surveys of all enterprise RTOs, which gained response rates of one-third and one-quarter respectively. This paper uses findings from the project to explore the institutional infrastructure associated with employer decisions to become enterprise RTOs and maintain that status. Three aspects are examined. Firstly, the paper reports how enterprise RTOs interact with the national vocational education and training (VET) system, in terms of compliance with national quality and reporting requirements. Secondly, it examines the internal infrastructures set up within the companies to operate the enterprise RTO itself and to carry out training that results in a national qualification. Thirdly it explores the impact upon workers (who are also learners) of this way of delivering training. The project found that the processes required to operate as an enterprise RTO were very complex and demanding, and that the enterprise RTO was regularly required to prove its worth to the broader company. In an unanticipated finding, it emerged that during the project’s life, changes in the economic and business environment affected the companies within which enterprise RTOs operated, affecting the operations and structure of the RTOs.
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Online social network (OSN) is one of the major platforms where our opinions are formed now-a-days and increasing so. Opinion formation dynamics captures the ways public opinions are formed, mainly from two different sources, (i) neighbours' opinions, (ii) external opinions from sources other than the neighbours. In this paper, we formulate an opinion formation model by considering two very important factors, that were ignored or a very little explored in the literature. First, we model the convincing power of the opinions encountered from the two sources. Second, we incorporate the experience of users' previous interactions with the two opinion sources. The problem is formulated as an agent based model where each member of an OSN is represented with an agent and their relationships with a graph. Finally through simulation, we create various scenarios, and apply our model to observe the steady state outcomes of the dynamics. This helps us to study the nature of the public opinions under various influences of our model parameters.
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European Simulation and Modelling Conference 2016, ESM 2016
Description:
Conventional power converters control pulse width modulation (PWM) signals based on the directly sensed feedback signals or estimated state signals. Recently, information and communication technologies are beginning to integrate power converters into smart grid applications. This paper presents a Hardware-In-The-Loop Testbed using a WirelessHART network for smart home applications in a case study. The main components of the testbed are OP4510 RT-LAB-RCP/HIL systems, Texas Instruments Digital Signal Controllers and AwiaTech wireless modules. In this testbed, wireless based controller is integrated with conventional digital controller. OP4510 is used to simulate power stages of the power converters in real time. Texas Instruments Digital Signal Controllers provide PWM signals from the control loop and communication loop. AwiaTech wireless modules are used to build a WirelessHART network to communicate with power converter from a supervisory program. The case study is to support reactive power in smart home applications using 3 bridgeless unidirectional power factor correction (PFC) converters. For this scenario, supervisor collects reactive power measurement data from the input power node and wirelessly transfers reactive power command values to the home appliances driven by PFC converters. Thus, reactive power demand can be minimized. The experimental result demonstrates the performance of the testbed in different communication delays.