GRCon20 - RadEOT: The Radio Educational Outreach Tool

Presented by Jamie Williams, Felicity Easton, Jordan Penney and Jon Lapington at GNU Radio Conference 2020 https://gnuradio.org/grcon20 There is a demand from teachers to develop educational technologies to improve student attainment, close the attainment gap between the most disadvantaged students versus those attending private schools, and provide the digital skills required for employment. The Radio Educational Outreach Tool (RadEOT) is an open-source, handheld, portable, low-cost multi-purpose education tool that utilises highly-configurable software defined radio (SDR), other commercial off the shelf (COTS) technologies, and a bespoke python-based interface. Using SDR, RadEOT collects and processes freely available radio sources, from aircraft transponder signals to radio astronomy, and utilises this data for educational purposes in subjects including physics and mathematics to support the existing national curriculum. Each task can be tailored to the needs of the individual student, and allows them to conduct experiments, collect data and answers question in real time to make science lessons more dynamic. In this paper, we introduce the RadEOT concept and technology, and identify routes to supporting the national curriculum in the classroom while also reducing teacher workloads.