Wireless Local Area Networks and Mobile Devices to Actualize the Notion of Ubiquitous Computing in Living Classrooms - A case study in teaching and learning Astrophysics

The integration of wireless local area network and wireless mobile devices allows to implement a complete information system able to support everyday activities unobtrusively and seamlessly as the ubiquitous computing paradigm says. Wireless mobile ad hoc networking could be successfully used in the construction of flexible and adaptive information system with no fixed infrastructure and it allows to covers multi-hop scenarios such as m-learning approaches. This paper describes choices and issues encountered in the adoption of wireless technologies as regards standards and topologies in order to realize a wireless network infrastructure suitable for teaching and learning Astrophysics using mobile devices. This study is part of the "Learning form Starlight" project presented by the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics to the Hewlett Packard Philanthropy foundation aiming at introducing in schools a new way of teaching and learning not strictly related to the classroom location context. The realization of this system outlines that the Wi-Fi standard in network deployment has up to now to be preferred to other available wireless technologies for the easiest way of set up connection and use and the possibility to implement different network topologies suitable for m-learning applications.