CEE Professors Joan Walker and Raja Sengupta partnered with the Leadership Education and Development (LEAD) Program, an intensive summer program intended to expose high school students to engineering, science, technology and math; by facilitating a project in which the students utilized trip tracking smartphone software to study how individuals use transportation infrastructure.
The three-week summer course, targeted at under-represented minorities, taught students fundamental engineering, computer programming, web design and scientific concepts. The program consisted of interfacing data provided by tracking of cellular smartphones to services like Twitter and Google Maps, as well as cutting-edge technology. Google, a sponsor of the LEAD program, hoped to include more computer science in the curriculum this year. The 10th and 11th graders practiced their skills by building a web site and tracking trips in 20 days, analyzing the data, and modeling the travel behavior of individuals.
See Trip Tracking via Smartphone: A Cool Way to Engage High School Students