In this manuscript, we discuss the use of mobile tech nology in a STEM course to leverage both competition and cooperation among undergraduate stu- dents. We have designed an entire course around The Google Online Marketing Challenge, which is a worldwide keyword advertising competition. A competition is an effective strategy to structure a course, is motivating for students, and provides a built-in evaluation mechanism of how the students do relative to others. However, the idea of a competition cannot be taken too far, as learning is also a cooperative event. In order to leverage both competition and cooperation, we designed a mobile app from which the students can access a location-aware and social networked learning assistance. The idea was to make the course material accessible indepen- dent of locations and make the interaction among the students possible 24 × 7. The students also contributed to the course by sharing material and interacted with other students' posted material via likes and comments. The student driven context col- lection and annotation has already improved the starting point for the course when it is taught next. There was also a notable improvement in the quality of the students' finished products. Of the 16 teams in the course, 3 teams were in the top 15 teams worldwide, with many of the other teams in the top 10 % of teams worldwide.
['Partha P. Mukherjee', 'Brad Kozlek', 'Allan S. Gyorke', 'Cole Camplese', 'Bernard J. Jansen']
Leveraging Mobile Technology to Enhance Both Competition and Cooperation in an Undergraduate STEM Course