Engaging undergraduates in research that speaks their language

Undergraduates are influenced by modern technology such as smart-phone apps, social networks and the Internet. Technology is perceived to be “cool” and students are often interested in gaining expertise in them. However, most of them lack access to the tools/knowledge needed for a developer level involvement and several lack the opportunity to experience the research that creates the “cool stuff” of the future. This research project aims at providing both the tools and the opportunity to undergraduates at a minority serving institution. Through two phases: training and research that spanned from July to December 2014, several undergraduates were engaged in cutting edge Internet and mobile networks research. The training and research objective were to develop android based applications for the MobilityFirst future Internet architecture. The training phase consisted of two 8-week long workshops. The first workshop was to discuss current research in Future Internet Architecture while the second provided training in JAVA programming language and Android application development. In the research phase, nine students participated in developing geo-social network applications that generated content and shared locally in a geographic region. These applications used Wi-Fi Direct and/or MobilityFirst future Internet architecture for communication without the need for wide-area network connectivity.