APRIL 16, 2018 — A new visual technology installed at several locations at the University of Hawai‘i (UH) at Hilo allows students to collaborate in real time on complicated projects.
CyberCANOE —acronym for Collaborative, Analytics, Navigation and Observation Environment — installed in a classroom at the UH Hilo Mookini Library, was built with the intention of multi-purpose usage. This installation allows for collaboration between many people — using SAGE2™, work done on each person’s individual computer is projected onto large communal CyberCANOE screens that can be observed and manipulated by all. That is, individuals do not need to be in the same room, or even on the same campus.
Bob Pelayo, UH Hilo associate professor of mathematics, uses the CyberCANOE display wall and SAGE2 software for data science research and education, enabling him and his students to collaborate and present complex data easily. While his students can use the system locally, they can also do remote ollaborative research between UH Hilo and UH Mānoa, “Because there are so many islands we want to collaborate as much as possible, but it’s hard. This allows us to be able to talk to our friends and colleagues on the Mānoa campus.”
For education, Pelayo recalls a specific example of when he used CyberCANOE to assist with a class for Summer Bridge students. “A bridge course is meant to take [new incoming] students who haven’t taken math and computer science and give them those skills over the summer so they can more quickly progress.” Half of Pelayo’s class was taking pre-calculus, while the other half was taking calculus. “I have to teach two courses at the same time to a set of students and I actually use the CyberCANOE to be able to do this,” explains Pelayo. To teach these two groups, he flipped the classroom model so that a student completed chapter readings at home and came to class to work on homework problems. Using the CyberCANOE, students shared their work on the screen. Pelayo recalls, “Students will be working on problems and if they get stuck on one, they simply flash it up on the wall and the class can then collaborate about how to complete it.”
What Pelayo finds to be one of the most beneficial factors of CyberCANOE is the democracy this brings to the classroom. “The instructor is just as able to put stuff up on the screen as one of the students is,” he explains. “I think that’s a very equalizing thing because it means that the comments and the contributions from the students are just as valuable as the teacher.”
This story appears in the “UH Hilo Stories,” an online publication of the Office of the Interim Chancellor. To read the entire article, see:
http://hilo.hawaii.edu/news/stories/2018/04/16/new-visualization-technology-at-uh-hilo/
SAGE2 receives major funding from the National Science Foundation (award #ACI-1441963).
SAGE and SAGE2 are trademarks of the University of Illinois Board of Trustees.
For more information, see: www.sagecommons.org
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PHOTO CREDIT: UH Hilo’s CyberCANOE in the Mookini Library. (Photo: Francis Cristobal, UH Hilo)