About Us
Computing has become an indispensable tool for enhancing productivity, accelerating scientific discovery and innovation, and enriching K-12 education. However, with respect to the latter, computing has arguably had limited impact on children, parents, and teachers in rural and economically disadvantaged areas and serves as additional evidence of the ever-expanding digital divide between the "haves" and "have nots." To address this inequity as well as reduce the overall cost of adopting and maintaining information technology (IT) infrastructures in K-12 education, we propose to build upon our CREU-supported virtualization project (http://service.cs.vt.edu/) by further leveraging virtualization in order to:
- Simplify and expedite the delivery of educational content anywhere and anytime. (Think a "free version of iTunes" but for education.)
- Create an engaging and "kid-friendly" curriculum so as to improve the quality of IT education holistically from elementary school through high school and in support of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).
In addition to delivering the benefits of lower cost and simplified management, which in turn, lower the "barrier to entry" for computing, our novel mapping of virtualization for K-12 pedagogy seeks to deliver a comparable level of computing services to rural and under-privileged areas that affluent areas already enjoy via their expansive physical resources. All of the above is captured in this project that we dub MyVICE, which is short for My Virtual Instances of Computing Environments.
