ED STEM Demonstration

Abstract: 

ED STEM has two main components:

ED STEM Q&A Discussion Platform is used extensively at Sydney University by 10,000+ students for STEM subjects (about 80 courses) and some other subjects too.  The discussion platform is designed to save teaching staff considerable time, while also increasing student engagement, peer learning and engaged enquiry in courses. The system is Q&A based, with an intuitive interface and supports rich content including LaTeX equations for maths and science (including physics and chemistry), runnable code snippets in many programming languages, as well as embedded videos, images and files, annotations, and has extensive analytics and gamification for teachers to monitor student engagement.  The students become part of a community for each course, and through communication and collaboration, learn from one another, and develop engaged enquiry and team collaboration skills.  

ED STEM Programming Workspaces is for teaching real world computing, to inspire and accelerate students,  and is used by 1,000+ computer science students in the School of IT in the University of Sydney.  For computing students, the platform emulates a real world environment with just a browser, without loading software, compilers or virtual machines on each student’s machine or setting up complex labs. Students learn how to understand and build “systems", not just learn a simple programming language. The environment sits in the cloud and includes many programming languages, shell interface, access to multiple files and folders at system admin and programming levels, web access, database access, and much more.  It provides extensive analytics for teachers to monitor progress. Collaboration for 2 or 100+ people working on the same programs, inside or outside the classroom, and provides challenges, tests, extensive practice, learning and coding assignments for students and has automated marking.  Most languages supported including:  C/C++, C#, Go, Java, Ruby, Swift, Python, Haskell, VB, Julia, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, SQL, Octave, R, Fortran and more.

ED STEM components may coexist with Blackboard, Canvas, Moodle, etc, so it does not replace an existing LMS or SMS.els range from simple models of energy balance to those that consider dynamically important ocean processes such as the conveyor-belt circulation (Meridional Overturning Circulation, MOC), North Atlantic Deep Water (NADW) formation, Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC) and eddy mixing.  Results from Bayesian analysis of such models using both ESM experiments and actual observations are presented.  One such result points to the importance of direct sequestration of heat below 700 m, a process that is not allowed for in the simple models that have been traditionally used to deduce climate sensitivity.