New Perspectives in Science Education

Object localization is used on a daily basis in the form of GPS use. Examples of indoor applications of positioning systems can be found in the care of the elderly, indoor navigation apps for museum visitors… When modeling the distance between sender and receiver in localization problems in wireless communication, the dependency of the received signal strength can be expressed mathematically by an exponential function.  Therefore the distance is commonly expressed in a lin-log scale as a function of the received signal strength. For engineering students it is more than interesting to see that the discipline of mathematics is at the service of a typical engineering field as telecommunication. Moreover this STEM topic is useful to make students reflect on the error of the estimated parameters when using the technique of linear regression to model the distance based on measured data obtained from a real-life test bed. The measured quantity is the received power expressed in dBm. Localization algorithms are close enough to the real world of students and interesting enough form mathematical point of view to use it in STEM classes.

Keywords: Curve fitting, telecommunication, estimation, logarithm;