National Science Education Standards

Teaching as a science.

Error Analysis in Mathematics Education.

The nature of mathematics

An administration of a private school located in the south reported the problem of a lack of curriculum fidelity to a new phonics program, which created a need to identify barriers preventing full curriculum implementation. Using the concerns-based adoption model (CBAM) as the conceptual framework, this qualitative case study identified concerns and barriers teachers report when implementing a new curriculum. Data were collected from 10 participants (8 teachers and 2 administrators) through a questionnaire, interviews, and observations. Participants were interviewed to identify any barriers experienced with curriculum fidelity of a new phonics program. Teachers were observed to determine which components of the curriculum were present in or omitted from their lessons. Participants completed a questionnaire to determine their levels of concern when asked to implement a new curriculum. Results indicated that teachers required additional information before the expected implementations occur and an understanding of demands on their personal time. Common themes showed a desire for professional development (PD), peer-collaboration, and access to curriculum resources, which served as the basis for the project. The resulting project integrated PD to address concerns connected to reoccurring themes. Implications for social change include change at a systematic level by providing administrators with data to support teachers during curriculum changes and substantiation for the benefits of understanding concerns prior to a change for improving curriculum fidelity.

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Barriers to Effective Curriculum Implementation

ii DEDICATION v ACKNOWLEDGEMENT vi TABLE OF CONTENTS viii LIST OF TABLES xi LIST OF FIGURES xvi CHAPTER

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Misconceptions of Students in Learning Mathematics at Primary Level.

Smart devices have become an essential part of the architectures such as the Internet of Things (IoT), Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs), and Internet of Everything (IoE). In contrast, these architectures constitute a system to realize the concept of smart cities and, ultimately, a smart planet. The adoption of these smart devices expands to different cyber-physical systems in smart city architecture, i.e., smart houses, smart healthcare, smart transportation, smart grid, smart agriculture, etc. The edge of the network connects these smart devices (sensors, aggregators, and actuators) that can operate in the physical environment and collects the data, which is further used to make an informed decision through actuation. Here, the security of these devices is immensely important, specifically from an authentication standpoint, as in the case of unauthenticated/malicious assets, the whole infrastructure would be at stake. We provide an updated review of authentication mechanisms by categorizing centralized and distributed architectures. We discuss the security issues regarding the authentication of these IoT-enabled smart devices. We evaluate and analyze the study of the proposed literature schemes that pose authentication challenges in terms of computational costs, communication overheads, and models applied to attain robustness. Hence, lightweight solutions in managing, maintaining, processing, and storing authentication data of IoT-enabled assets are an urgent need. From an integration perspective, cloud computing has provided strong support. In contrast, decentralized ledger technology, i.e., blockchain, light-weight cryptosystems, and Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based solutions, are the areas with much more to explore. Finally, we discuss the future research challenges, which will eventually help address the ambiguities for improvement.

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A Comparative Analysis on Blockchain versus Centralized Authentication Architectures for IoT-Enabled Smart Devices in Smart Cities: A Comprehensive Review, Recent Advances, and Future Research Directions

The mechanisms based on the distributed environment have become an obvious choice for solutions, while they have not been limited only to a specific domain (i.e., crypto-currency). Rather, it has influenced other industries to develop robust privacy and security solutions, such as smart houses, smart electrical grids, smart agriculture, smart health care, smart transportation, etc. These Cyber-Physical Systems heavily depend on IoT-based smart devices that constitute a networked system of devices dependent on each other for the smooth operation of the overall system. Hence, security and privacy have become integral to all the architectural frameworks they operate in. The adoption of these architectures, such as the Internet of Things (IoT), Internet of Cyber-Physical Things (IoCPT), Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs), and Internet of Everything (IoE), has reinforced the need to develop solutions based on a distributed environment. Distributed ledger technology, i.e., Blockchain, has taken the lead and may support the development of robust privacy and security solutions. We provide an updated review of authentication mechanisms developed on blockchain technology that enforce decentralized architectures. We discuss the security issues regarding the authentication of these IoT-enabled smart devices. We evaluate and analyze the study of the proposed literature schemes that pose authentication challenges in terms of computational costs, communication overheads, and models applied to attain robustness. Hence, lightweight solutions for managing, maintaining, processing, and storing authentication data of IoT-enabled assets are a must. From an integration perspective, cloud computing has provided strong support. In contrast, decentralized ledger technology, i.e., Blockchain, and lightweight cryptosystems are the areas for much more to explore. Finally, we discuss the future research challenges, which present an improvement standpoint to help address the ambiguities.

/pdf/a-blockchain-footprint-for-authentication-of-iot-enabled-2h4e8xov.pdf

A Blockchain Footprint for Authentication of IoT-Enabled Smart Devices in Smart Cities: State-of-the-Art Advancements, Challenges and Future Research Directions

IoT-enabled smart devices have become an essential part of the smart city architectures, which establishes all the underlying architectures to operate altogether, such as the Internet of Things (IoT), Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs), Internet of Cyber-Physical Things (IoCPT), and Internet of Everything (IoE). Similarly, these underlying architectures constitute a system to realize the concept of smart cities and, ultimately, a smart planet. A private blockchain-based architecture, Decentralized Smart City of Things (DSCoT), has been proposed in this study which utilizes Blockchain tokenization (i.e., Non-fungible tokens-NFTs) for the representation and authentication of user and IoT assets by defining smart device attributes. Through NFTs, the uniqueness of the IoT assets and users has been realized, which helps digitize these assets as non-interchangeable units of data stored on a digital ledger. The proposed architecture ensures this functionality of unique asset representation by deploying smart contracts and further for IoT assets and user authentication. The mechanism provides security services such as confidentiality, integrity (using SHA-III one-way encryption), availability, and authorization (CIA). The evaluation of the proposed functions and components has been provided in terms of Gas consumption and time complexity, showing promising results. An innovative approach of functions to query the smart contract for the status of assets in the NFT registry offers no transaction cost (in Ether/Gewi), making the proposed extension efficient in terms of time complexity. This architecture aims to provide a smart city solution that may ensure robust security features utilizing Blockchain, NFTs, and SHA-III encryption mechanisms.

Decentralized Smart City of Things: A Blockchain Tokenization-enabled Architecture for Digitization and Authentication of Assets in Smart Cities

Smart city architecture brings all the underlying architectures, i.e., Internet of Things (IoT), Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs), Internet of Cyber-Physical Things (IoCPT), and Internet of Everything (IoE), together to work as a system under its umbrella. The goal of smart city architecture is to come up with a solution that may integrate all the real-time response applications. However, the cyber-physical space poses threats that can jeopardize the working of a smart city where all the data belonging to people, systems, and processes will be at risk. Various architectures based on centralized and distributed mechanisms support smart cities; however, the security concerns regarding traceability, scalability, security services, platform assistance, and resource management persist. In this paper, private blockchain-based architecture Decentralized Smart City of Things (DSCoT) is proposed. It actively utilizes fog computing for all the users and smart devices connected to a fog node in a particular management system in a smart city, i.e., a smart house or hospital, etc. Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have been utilized for representation to define smart device attributes. NFTs in the proposed DSCoT architecture provide devices and user authentication (IoT) functionality. DSCoT has been designed to provide a smart city solution that ensures robust security features such as Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability (CIA), and authorization by defining new attributes and functions for Owner, User, Fog, and IoT devices authentication. The evaluation of the proposed functions and components in terms of Gas consumption and time complexity has shown promising results. Comparatively, the Gas consumption for minting DSCoT NFT showed approximately 27%, and a DSCoT approve() was approximately 11% more efficient than the PUF-based NFT solution.

Usman Khalil

Papers

Misconceptions of Students in Learning Mathematics at Primary Level.

A Comparative Analysis on Blockchain versus Centralized Authentication Architectures for IoT-Enabled Smart Devices in Smart Cities: A Comprehensive Review, Recent Advances, and Future Research Directions

A Blockchain Footprint for Authentication of IoT-Enabled Smart Devices in Smart Cities: State-of-the-Art Advancements, Challenges and Future Research Directions

Decentralized Smart City of Things: A Blockchain Tokenization-enabled Architecture for Digitization and Authentication of Assets in Smart Cities

DSCOT: An NFT-Based Blockchain Architecture for the Authentication of IoT-Enabled Smart Devices in Smart Cities