Award Data

n prior work, the researchers built a series of virtual physics labs to assess middle school student’s science inquiry practice and understanding. In this project, the team is developing and testing a prototype of Inq-Blotter, a web-based platform intended to provide teachers immediate feedback on student progress while using the labs. The prototype dashboard will alert teachers when students ar ...

Video Demonstration of the Phase I Prototype: http://youtu.be/P716_x5KhPk Purpose: This project team will develop and test iASK, an app intended to assess and support increased word recognition among middle school students who struggle to read. The 2013 National Assessment of Education Progress reported that 66% of middle school students scored below proficient in reading, and 22% scored below ba ...

Purpose: In this project the research team will develop and test a web-based platform, Lingo Jingo, designed to support educators in efficiently and effectively generating customized plans and materials to support the needs of K–12 English language learners. In 2012 in the United States, 4.4 million or approximately 9% of all K–12 students were classified as English language learners (ELLs). E ...

Conversion of biomass into useful fungible chemicals and fuels is a long standing challenge. A key requirement of such processes is high efficiency of conversion for economic viability. Biomass derived sugars are highly oxygenated and need processing to remove to be converted into useful hydrocarbons.We propose an integrated bio-thermochemical platform for production of a hydrocarbon which can be ...

Wildland fires cost billions of dollars a year in the US, threatening homes, lives, and valuable natural resources. Large amounts of chemical additives, including those in water enhancers, foam fire suppressants, and long-term retardants are used in battling wildland fires to slow the spread of the fire and enable firefighters to work safely on the ground. Millions of gallons of water and hundreds ...

Culturing fish today is organized around two key steps: multiplication of fish in the hatcheries and the increase of fish biomass in grow-out production. This transition is more-or-less linear: immediately after spawning eggs get fertilized, develop and hatch, they are grown to the fry/fingerling/smolt stage, and get transferred to grow-out production. This cycle starts with the spawning event, wh ...

In this Phase I SBIR program, Reactive Innovations, LLC (RIL) will demonstrate an advanced system to recover valuable nutrients from animal manure. Since World War II, the availability of relatively cheap mineral fertilizers has been a major factor spurring specialization of production agriculture, in which crop (cereal) production has been increasingly separated from livestock production. One imp ...

Controlled environment agriculture (CEA) has been used intensively worldwide to produce high quality products. One important issue associated with CEA is that temperature control of the greenhouse is often difficult to achieve, requiring large amount of fuel and/or electric power. Physical Sciences Inc. (PSI), in collaboration with the Department of Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering, The Uni ...

Many different disease-causing microbes, or pathogens, can contaminate foods and lead to foodborne illnesses. Every year, as many as one in six Americans experiences a foodborne illness, meaning they get sick by consuming contaminated foods or beverages. Pathogen decontamination of meat carcasses to control meat contamination at the start of the meat processing is one of the methods to eliminate d ...

Central Iowa-based small business, Agren, Inc., has collaborated with the USDA-ARS Sedimentation Laboratory and the University of Tennessee since 2007 to develop two soil loss modeling tools currently referred to as the Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation- Raster (RUSLER) and the Ephemeral Gully Erosion Estimator (EphGEE). Each tool combines remotely-sensed, high-resolution digital elevation mode ...