Partner Project Description
Project: Curriculum Development Workshop "Interdisciplinary, Collaborative, Peer-Reviewed, Computationally Intensive, Real-World Problem Solving"
Partner(s): BioQUEST Curriculum Consortium, SWOF, Visualize Education (Croquet) Potential Partners: ChemLinks, Workshop Physics, Workshop
Mathematics Audience: Undergraduate Faculty Categories: PD,L, S, C
Overall Description
We propose to conduct a nine day workshop entitled for thirty undergraduate faculty participants.
The 2005 BioQUEST Curriculum Development Workshop will address the NRC Bio2010 recommendation that undergraduate science education needs to be (1) more interdisciplinary, (2) mathematically and computationally intensive, and (3) reflective of contemporary science in terms of dealing with terabytes of data that are generated daily. Thus, we have invited Workshop Physics, Workshop Mathematics, and ChemLinks to join the BioQUEST Curriculum Consortium in an effort to examine these issues, compare one another's curricular materials and technologies as well as their approaches, and construct new curricular materials that address the above three NRC Bio2010 challenges. We propose to collaborate with a number of EOT-PACI partners in this endeavor.
Our 9-day Curriculum Development Workshop format is that participants spend the first three days as students using well honed curricular materials, the second three days examining how they might adopt and adapt curricular materials in earlier stages of development into field trials in their own teaching programs, and finally, the last three days are spent in developing completely new curricular materials. In the first two days, each of the four curricular reform projects will engage participants in a three hour laboratory activity.
Dr. Roscoe Giles will be asked to give the keynote talk the first evening on CyberInfrastructure's challenges and opportunities for undergraduate science and mathematics education.
On the evening of the second day and half of the third day, faculty will work on taking the scientific challenge from one or more of these four workshops and developing a scientific poster that will be peer reviewed by all other participants and staff.
During the week, we will invite Dr. Rick Stevens from Argonne National Lab to present on navigating large phylogenetic trees (with on the order of 60,000 terminal vertices) from their Phylo project using tools developed in their "Scientific Workplaces of the Future" (SWOF) project using Access Grid technologies. We have already run one successful demonstration of the multi-user, multi-visualization environment at a previous workshop and received front page coverage in an Argonne Lab newsletter. We also have had demos from the Pacific Northwest National Lab on collaboratories and we are hopeful that aspect of SWOF can also be deployed by educators and students engaged in these four curricular reform efforts. The potential for multidisciplinary collaboration amongst leaders with a history of pioneering is exciting.
A third CyberInfrastructure partner will be Dr. Julian Lombardi, Vice President of the Division of Instructional Technology at the University of Wisconsin Madison. He is part of Ed Boyce's group deploying David Smith's Croquet project to have a full 3D portal environment for collaborative multidimensional visualization with collaborative control. If we can get David Smith here as well, we will try (his son is a first year Beloit student). We had a previous demonstration of this technology at a BioQUEST annual workshop by Dr. Alan Kay; participants were extraordinarily excited but at that time the Croquet environment wasn't yet available to a much wider audience. We have had follow up meetings with both Drs. Kay and Smith about collaborating with "squeak.org" and Croquet in Washington, in Palo Alto (at Hewlitt Packard), and with the University of California - Merced administrative staff about planning their new curriculum.
Fourth and finally, we will maintain our long-standing working relationship with the University of Illinois Urbana - Champaign by inviting Professor Chip Bruce to give a talk on CyberInfrastructure education. Dr. Bruce has developed taxonomies for deep use of sophisticated CyberInfrastructure in classrooms and labs as well as evaluating how learning is actually changed by studying students in a diverse variety of contexts.
The BioQUEST Curriculum Consortium is an 18 year old initiative dedicated to collaborative, peer-viewed quantitative problem solving in order to help students learn long-term strategies of research. It actively supports educators interested in the reform of undergraduate biology to reflect contemporary scientific research and engages in the collaborative development of curricula. We are particularly concerned that curricular materials are vetted by multiple stages of peer review such that curricular materials get tested in multiple institutions with heterogeneous groups of students and are iteratively improved after feedback.
BioQUEST has produced the following resources: The BioQUEST Library (which includes over 80 peer reviewed computer simulations and tools), BioQUEST Notes, the BioQUEST Website (http://www.bioquest.org), publications by project staff and participants, workshops and presentations for institutions and organizations, support of an extended BioQUEST community, and a book: Microbes Count!: Problem Posing, Problem Solving and Persuading Peers in Microbiology (co-edited by John R. Jungck, Marion Field Fass, and Ethel Stanley). BioQUEST encourages the use of simulations, databases, real-time data acquisition and analysis, digital video microscopy and image analysis, GIS/GPS, and bioinformatics tools to construct learning environments where students are able to engage in activities like those of practicing scientists. A theoretical context for the use of these simulations, tools, databases, and investigative case-based learning in undergraduate biology education will be presented in the context of addressing the National Research Council's recommendations in their publication Biology 2010 (National Academies Press, 2003).
Workshop Physics will be represented by its founder, Professor Priscilla Laws. It began in 1986. The lectureless approach that Workshop Physics has heralded has been widely adopted across the nation not only in physics, but in biology and chemistry as well. They are particularly known as well for the development and extensive use of probes and interactive software that help students develop a kinesthetic and mathematical sense of physical concepts such as inertia, momentum, acceleration, and harmonic motion. They received national attention when their students were the only ones with baseline radiation data in the region before the Three Mile Island nuclear plant leak. Their software for doing kinematic analysis and understanding of the use of calculus for studying stability of equilibria, half-lives, predicting asymptotic behavior, and collective impacts of low probability events have received numerous awards.
Workshop Mathematics will be represented by its founder, Professor Nancy Baxter Hastings. Workshop Mathematics courses seek to:
- help students develop confidence about their abilities to think about and do mathematics.
- enhance students' understanding of fundamental mathematical concepts.
- increase students' ability to use these concepts in other disciplines.
- encourage students to read and write about mathematical ideas.
- impel students to be active learners, not passive observers.
- inspire students to continue their study of mathematics."
ChemLinks will be represented by its founder, Professor Brock Spencer. ChemLinks is one of the five systemic initiatives in college and university chemical education reform funded by NSF. Since their initial five year funding they have collaborated with the other four systemic initiatives in offering workshops for college and university faculty in bring in real world problems such as global warming, ozone holes, and malaria, along with contemporary technology such as nanotechnology and how car collision impact bags and CD readers function.
At the end of the Fall 2005 semester, we will be contacting the summer workshop participants. We will be summarizing individual products and reporting on successes and challenges for the Spring 2006 BQ Notes.
Impacts
Community Building
This proposal creates an opportunity for both EOT-PACI partners and successful science reform project leaders to interact with a group of motivated undergraduate faculty to explore potential collaborations. BioQUEST has a long history (19 years) of success at community building.
Scaling and Broad Dissemination
The workshop will be advertised nationally. Results of this workshop will be disseminated through a variety of conference presentations and posters. The workshop will be highlighted in BioQUEST Notes. In addition, participant developed curriculum materials based on the workshop focus will be made accessible online.
Connection to CI
This proposal supports potential collaborations for CI project developed specifically for undergraduate education.
Connection to Past EOT Successes
BioQUEST Curriculum Development workshops have led to dissemination of materials to over 200 institutions through two funded NSF grant proposals, publication of two books as well as several papers, and development of a cadre of faculty who use and present on Biology WorkBench.
Collaborative Research: EPIC-Engaging People in Cyberinfrastructure
Principal Investigator: Amado Gonzalez Co-Principal Investigator: Dr George Dulikravich College of Engineering Florida International University 10555 West Flagler Street Miami, Florida 33174
Minority Serving Institution Consortium
Amado.Gonzalez@fiu.edu George.Dulikravich@fiu.edu
Proposed Activities as requested for 15 months, starting March 1, 2005 until May 31,
Training / Workshop
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MSI Conference
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Resource Database
01. Training / Workshops
As part of the Training and workshop component of this request, I have gotten approval from distinguished Engineers and Scientist to give two hour session over the Access Grid and distribute to the Nation in various areas. These training activities will take place once a month. These specific topics were chosen because of their abilities to run on parallel machines. These are …
01. Dr George Dulikravich - Chair Mechanical and materials Engineering
- a.Optimized Design of Cooling of Turbine blades
b.Cooling of Human Brain of Stroke victim
c.Materials Processing using Magnetic and Electric Fields
02. Dr Anthony McGoron Biomedical Engineering
- a. Drug Delivery and Drug Transport Modeling
b.Modeling and Simulation
- c. Specific fields targeted are
b.Chemistry
c.Life Science
03. Dr Malek Adjouadi - Director Center for Advanced Technology and Education
- a. Assistive Technologies and Neuroscience research
b.electroencephalogram (EEG) one sensor per machine in a 250 sensor head cap
c.(EEG) is a test to detect abnormalities in the electrical activity of the brain
04. Dr Armando Barreto Digital signal Processing Laboratory
a. Neural Networks and Digital Signal Processing
05. Dr Eric Crumpler Biomedical Engineering McNair Program Coordinator
a. Bioreactors, bioengineering, and biomaterials for drug delivery and tissue engineering
Tissue Engineering problems on the cluster.
06. Mr. Amado Gonzalez Engineering Information Center Graphic Simulation Laboratory Minority Serving Institution Consortium
- a. 3D Modeling and Visualization
b.Rendering on the Cluster with Persistence of Vision Raytracer
c.Animation
07. Mr. Alson Been Bethune Cookman College Vice President of Information Technology
a. C3S Cluster tools
08. Dr Brian Dennis University of Texas at Arlington UTA
a. MPI and building Cluster
09. Ms. Stephenie Mclean University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign National Center for Supercomputing Applications
- a. Minority Serving Institution Consortium
b.Emerging High Performance Communities
10. Mr Tom Coffin ACCESS DC – NCSA National Center for Supercomputing Applications
b.AGAVE – Access Grid Augmented Virtual Environemnt
c.Passive Stereo wall
11. Dr Sakhrat Khizroev Nanosystems Research Center Florida International University
- a.Computational Nanotechnology
b.Nanofabrication
12. Ms. Jennifer Teig Von Hoffman Boston University
a. Shared Application on the Access Grid.
02. MSI Conference
The conference component will be one MSI conference that takes place torward the end of the 2005 year. The MSI conference will be tied into an already existing conference like the Supercomputing Conference, the Richard Tapia conference, or the Hopper Conference. As part of the Budget in preparing for this there will be 15 available slots that will be covered for travel, room and board, and food. The MSI conference should showcase the work that has gone on throughout the year as well as presentation of papers and continued Training for the MSI community.
03. Resource Database
A database of all MSI participants, and Universities will be made to have an area to access information about research going on at the MSI’s as well as resources and services available to the MSI community.
As part of the preparation process for these proposed activities I have gone through The Dean of Engineering at FIU ,Vish Prasad, I have also contacted are Division of Sponsored Research and Training. I have filled out the Internal Clearance Form and gotten the signatures from the Dean as well as the DSRT personnel. I have met with are Budgets personnel Sylvan Roglis and prepared the Budget sheet for the March 1, 2005 to May 31, 2006, 15 month duration. The indirect cost specific to training grants is 8.0%
The Total Direct and Indirect Cost is 80,000 dollars.
This will include the PI and Co-Pi, the Honorarium Overload pay to all of the Training Personnel, the travel and room of 15 MSI members to the MSI conference, The overload cost to the personnel for maintenance and support in that year, Computer Services and Time, permanent equipment for the AG, and an Educational Supply stipend for those attending the workshops and training.
I hope that we are awarded the requested amount and look forward to beginning in March of 2005. If you have any question please let me know.
Kind regards,
Amado Gonzalez Access Grid Director The Engineering Center Florida International University Minority Serving Institution Consortium Humanities, Art, Science, Technology, Advanced Collaboratory Latin American and Caribbean Consortium of Engineering Institutions
STATEMENT of WORK
EPIC at the Math Forum @ Drexel
The Math Forum @ Drexel will catalog and evaluate partner-produced K-12 tools and teaching materials in a National Science Digital Library project, MathTools, at
http://www.mathforum.org/mathtools/. The project will capitalize on the Math Forum's large and active national community to disseminate materials at a broad national level.
The project will:
catalog the tools and materials so that teachers, students, professional development deliverers, and other users can easily find ones fit their needs;
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present the tools and materials using content strand portals for grades K-7 and course subject portals for grades 8-Calculus; and
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facilitate discussions groups and develop communities of users supporting each other to use the materials.
In addition, Cynthia Lanius, Associate Director of the Math Forum and former EOTPACI Leadership Team member at Rice University will serve on the Collaborative Research: EPIC - Engaging People in Cyberinfrastructure leadership team. Cynthia has extensive experience in K-12-- twelve years as a high school mathematics teacher, ten years developing and delivering teacher professional development in mathematics teaching and teaching with technology (all subjects, all grades, and seven years developing K-12 standards-based curriculum that integrates technology (see http://math.rice.edu/~lanius/Lessons. Cynthia has also worked with diversity programs, establishing GirlTECH at the former Center for Research in Parallel Computation, and serving as a prominent developer and implementer of the Rice University Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP)
The Math Forum @ Drexel (http://mathforum.org/) is an interactive, inquiry-based resource center for mathematics. It has become one of the most successful applications of the Internet to education through services bridging higher education, K12, and workplace communities. These services form the basis for a knowledge-building environment that generates high quality mathematical content, supports student learning, integrates the benefits of technology into the classroom, and is used for pre- and in-service teacher education.
The Math Forum is comprised of over 1.2 million pages of content, has over 2 million visits a month, receives up to 9,000 queries a month at its Ask Dr. Math expert help service, and mentored over 27,000 students during the 2000-2001 school year through its Problem of the Week programs. Among its most recent projects are two National Science Foundation-funded programs, one focused on the use of online student mentoring programs in pre-service teacher education courses, and the other on the development of MathTools, a National Science Digital Library (NSDL) project for software in mathematics education. The Math Tools project created a digital library of mathematical software critical to the learning of school mathematics, including software for handheld devices, small interactive web-based tools such as applets, and other computer software. The proposed EPIC project will live within the MathTools site, making those resources readily available to the cyberinfrastructure and K-12 communities.
Dissemination: Because of the high visibility of the Math Forum website, over 2 million visits a month, dissemination will be a strength of this project. In addition to having its own section on the Math Forum website, the EPIC project will be featured prominently in several other areas -- on the front page of the Math Forum as one of its What’s New Features and on the MathTools portal. The Math Forum Newsletter will distribute EPIC information to over 3000 readers. Math Forum personnel will include information about EPIC in its presentations at mathematics and technology conferences (approximately 6 per year.)
NCSA Proposed Activities for project titled: "Collaborative Research: EPIC - Engaging People in Cyberinfrastructure"
Project 1: Scientific Data in the Classroom
Project Leads Edee Wiziecki, Nick Exner, Ernest Baello III
NCSA/UIUC Partners Automated Learning Group at NCSA
External Partners SDSC, OSC, Shodor, and others interested in collaborating
Goals The goal is to work with educators to integrate data management, data mining and data analysis into their courses. The initial emphasis will be on undergraduate and graduate courses, while the team explores opportunities for introducing these methods into K-12 classrooms to address national and state learning standards.
Background NCSA and SDSC have developed innovative data tools for management, mining and analysis that are significantly advancing scientific research and discovery. OSC has developed courses on data analysis. Shodor has developed workshop materials to assist faculty with scientific data analysis.
Objectives This project will G Raise the awareness of data mining and analysis tools for scientific inquiry among
educators through major conferences and workshops G Conduct user requirements on data mining needs in education G Conduct workshops and seminars to introduce the tools and methods to educators G Utilize the Access Grid for workshops and seminars to reach larger audiences G Develop data mining exemplars in multiple disciplines that augment data mining
text books and that address the requirements identified by educators.
Timeline A user requirements workshop will be conducted in the first quarter.
Exemplars will be developed in collaboration with educators throughout the project.
Workshops for educators will be conducted in Q2-Q4 of year one, and Q1 of year 2.
Tutorials, lesson plans, curricular materials and software will be accessible through the web and the NSDL.
Participants The workshops will include undergraduate and graduate faculty, high school teachers, and policy-makers.
Outcomes G User requirements documents G Tutorials and materials that can be used for training and education G Curricular materials and lesson plans that are developed G Community of practice that works together to advance the field G New software and/or interfaces tailored to community requirements
Metrics G Number of events and participants G Number of tutorials, lesson plans, resources produced G New proposals that are funded G Number of users of the tools
Project 2: Visualization in Education
Project Leads Edee Wiziecki, Ernest Baello III
NCSA/UIUC Partners NCSA Visualization Group
External Partners Boston University, Cornell, West Point, East Carolina University, Shodor, SDSC, etc.
Goals NCSA will work with the Viz-Ed team to advance the adoption of visualization methodologies into K-20 education. The goal is to provide teachers with appropriate tools and resources, as well as ready-to-use materials appropriate for classroom instruction.
Background NCSA has a long history of developing advanced scientific visualization tools and methods to support scientific discovery and inquiry. NCSA has worked extensively with a range of software and hardware technologies to identify appropriate solutions to analyzing complex data and information for real-time, inquiry-based discovery.
The NCSA Education group is helping to co-lead the REVITALISE project funded by NSF that assists middle and high school teachers with adopting visualization technologies into their math and science classes to enhance student achievement and address national and state learning standards.
Through this project, NCSA has developed NCSA Easy Viz (an easy to use 3-D visualization tool) and NCSA DataBridge (an easy to use data converter). Additionally, numerous tutorials have been developed for these and other visualization tools. The teacher participants have developed materials to support math and science education which are available via the project web site.
Objectives The NCSA team will develop tutorials on visualization tools, further develop data transformation tools, and collect lesson plans and resources developed by middle and high school teachers for broad dissemination.
In collaboration with educators, NCSA will explore the application of Croquet and other innovative new visualization technologies for enhancing math and science education.
Timeline Workshops with educators will be conducted throughout the 15 months of the project.
Participants Middle and high school teachers will be involved in the workshops.
Outcomes G Additional visualization tools and tutorials
Metrics G Number of educators using visualization in the classroom G Number of tools and resources produced
Project 3: EPIC Web Site
Project Leads Dee Chapman, Ernest Baello III, Nosh Contractor
External Partners Boston University SDSC Possibly Shodor for NSDL related activities
Goals Dee Chapman and Ernest Baello will continue to work with Ed Boyce and Raquell Holmes on the support of the web site for the project, building on the strong foundation provided by the EOT-PACI development of the www.eot.org web site.
Background Dee has spent 50% of her time supporting the EOT-PACI web site for the past year, and will use this as the foundation for dissemination of EPIC materials on the web. She was instrumental in the re-design of the web site that includes a database back-end for maintaining information. In addition, Ernest Baello and Ed Boyce have done extensive work in the last year to make the web site resources NSDL compliant in order to accelerate the dissemination of these resources and materials.
Objectives Foster the creation of an I-KNOW (http://www.spcomm.uiuc.edu/Projects/TECLAB/IKNOW/ ) knowledge network for the EOT community – starting with our partners. The intent is to make the community more aware of the people and resources available.
Continue to maintain the EOT-PACI web site for a period of 15 months for dissemination of EPIC materials on the web, and add content from the community to broaden the dissemination of partner activities, and foster community engagement.
Outcomes G Increased community awareness G Evaluation tool for Cyberinfrastructure readiness G NSDL connectivity and integration
Metrics G Increased usage of the web site G Increased dissemination of our resources
Workplan – The Ohio Supercomputer Center
OSC will work on three aspects of the project. First, we will extend our work on instructional materials that can be used by K-12 teachers to introduce modeling and simulation into their curriculum or for professional development workshops for teachers. Second, we will support and evaluate the online high performance computing training provided by the Partners for Advanced Computational Services by responding to discussion spaces, surveying communities, and identifying customized asynchronous learning modules. Finally, we will work with the Eisenhower National Clearinghouse on Science and Math Education to begin distributing more information about the EOT program and its applications to K-12 education. Each of these work tasks is described in more detail below.
Extending the Reach of EOT-PACI Projects
In-service and pre-service teachers have limited experience with the applications of technology to science and mathematics instruction. One of the major EOT-PACI projects was the creation of instructional materials that demonstrated the use of computation as a focal point for problem and project-based learning activities. Materials were created in a number of formats – from simple exercises posted on websites to multiple, structured exercises used in face-to-face workshops and full, credit courses.
One example of a project aimed at building knowledge of the hydrologic cycle, hurricanes and flood damage, and the process of building and testing a statistical model can be seen at http://www.osc.edu/education/webed/Projects/floyd/. The exercise uses real data from Hurricane Floyd and readily available tools available in Microsoft Excel to build a model of flooding associated with the hurricane. An additional module will be completed shortly which then uses the flooding estimates to estimate property damage from the storm. The exercise meets a number of the criteria for experience-based learning that are parts of the national and many state science standards, as well as some of the mathematics standards.
Materials such as these were embedded in a graduate level course for teachers taught at The Ohio State University as both a regular course and a distance learning course. The course reviews a number of different techniques to using modeling and simulation to provide an engaging method to learning science and math concepts. The course reviews several different modeling and statistical analysis tools, available datasets suitable for modeling tasks, and guidelines for creating projects that can substitute for traditional teaching methods in the classroom.
Although these materials have been successfully used by a number of pre- and in-service teachers in workshops and credit courses, the audience we have been able to reach has been somewhat limited. Our goal in the current project is to focus on the wider dissemination of these materials so that they will have a broader impact on teacher professional development. Several tasks will help us to reach this goal:
The creation of support materials that allow teachers to utilize the materials directly in their courses or to allow teacher-educators to create teacher professional development workshops where they are used. Our experience in using the materials has allowed us to accumulate a great deal of information concerning the most frequently asked questions and the concerns of first-time users considering adoption of the materials. Our first major task will be to codify this experience in the form of on-line tutorials and help documents that will guide prospective users through the experience and address the majority of their questions.
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Adoption of a new approach is often inhibited by the current curriculum requirements in the schools. In order to gain wider adoption of this new approach, it is critical to correlate our materials with state and national standards. Our second task will be to delineate the standards that are addressed by each of the sets of materials. Both national and state standards will be reviewed and the standards that are applicable will be compiled into an on-line database that allows for easy search and retrieval.
Asynchronous Learning Module Development
The asynchronous courses developed by the training team of the Alliance Partners for Advanced Computational Services (PACS) have been extremely successful, in part, due to the synergies, common interests, and diverse knowledge of the group. The training group is led by the Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) and consists of members from Boston University, National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), OSC, and University of Kentucky.
The six online courses developed to date, the development date, and the number of logins for those courses are listed in the table below
Online HPC Course Title |
Fiscal Year (PACI) Developed |
Logins as of September 2004 |
Introduction to MPI |
FY01 |
10,941 |
Introduction to OpenMP (BU lead) |
FY02 |
857 |
Multilevel Parallel Programming |
FY02 |
663 |
Intermediate MPI |
FY03 |
747 |
Performance Tuning for Clusters |
FY04 |
284 |
Parallel Numerical Libraries |
FY04 |
73 |
Access Grid Tutorials (BU lead) |
FY04 & FY05 |
3401 |
Debugging Computational Programs |
FY05 |
Public 11/1/2004 |
In addition to the online HPC courses listed above, the PACS training group is also responsible for a number asynchronous tutorials about the Access Grid (AG). Topics cover the technology, implementation, and use. Over 3400 logins have accessed the AG tutorials in the past two years. Boston University began leading this effort in FY05.
A procedure found effective for online course development involves identifying a topic, developing an outline of lessons, defining key components for each lesson, assigning content providers for each lesson, and the review process. Key components of each lesson included stated objectives up front, self tests and sample problems at the end, and numerous example codes in both Fortran and C throughout the lessons. In addition, each course includes a glossary of terms and a discussion space for community interaction. In the next year, the PACS training team would continue monitoring the discussion space and support student questions.
As shown in the above table, the response to our introductory course on MPI has been overwhelming. In glancing at the contact information, it appears that a number of institutions use this course in their curriculum. The PACS training team would like to examine this more closely. In the next year, the PACS training team would identify institutions, contact individuals, and work with instructors to determine criteria, course improvements, and customization for curriculum use.
Given the number of online training materials developed by the PACS training team a natural progression may be to develop learning objects that could be dynamically integrated by the student to fit their needs. In the next year, components for an interface, modules, their potential connections, and example tutorials built with different components will be determined. We will identify groups of modules according to skill level, and demonstrate interoperability and possible ordering. For example, the student could build a course based on a particular topic – connect topic descriptions, with potential topic bottlenecks, optimizing techniques for the topic, define alternative methods, and end with a connection to sample problems.
Topics for asynchronous courses were determined, in part, by the longevity of libraries. The MPI, developed in FY01 of the PACI program, was the first course developed by the PACS training group. While MPI-2 has been slow to be implemented, it is becoming more commonplace. In the next year, the PACS training team will update the course with MPI-2 components.
The work above depends on the continuing participation of the PACS training partners from Boston University, National Center for Supercomputing Applications, and University of Kentucky.
ENC support for EOT-PACI NSF proposal
ENC will support the EOT-PACI effort to disseminate information about its resources to K-12 educators across the nation. ENC has 12 years of experience in creating web sites and has the largest collection of K-12 mathematics and science curriculum resources in the nation. It is widely regarded as the premier resource for K-12 mathematics and science education. There have been more than 80 million page views of ENC Online databases and directories from users in the United States and more than 100 foreign countries. ENC Online (http://www.enc.org) includes its easily searched catalog of curriculum resources that describes more than 26,000 materials in ENC’s collection. ENC Online includes the weekly ENC Focus online magazine (http://www.enc.org/features/focus/ ) and a major set of professional development resources titled By Your Own Design (http://www.enc.org/professional/guide/ ). ENC reaches more than 135,000 educators with its print publication, ENC Focus Review, approximately 68,000 of whom are middle and high school math and science teachers.
In addition, ENC has created and worked on several NSF-funded digital library web sites and created the database and web site for the TE-MAT program, also funded by NSF (http://www.te-mat.org/ ). ENC works closely with digital library projects and TE-MAT on a continuing basis and can draw upon these rich resources as well.
ENC has recently published an issue of ENC Focus on computational science (www.enc.org/features/focus/archive/computational). The issue defines computational science, gives examples of K-12 computational science projects, and focuses on two examples, the Houston PREP program and the Young Women’s Science Institute at the Ohio Supercomputer Center. ENC will produce two follow-up issues of Focus featuring EOT-PACI materials produced through this project with links to additional resources. ENC will also disseminate information about the EOT-PACI program through its email newsletters, online bulletins on the ENC Online homepage, and ENC Focus Review.
Boston University Scope of work Boston University will be responsible for successful management and planning for EPIC, the website content and public dissemination, the Visualize Education AATT project, and development of training modules in collaboration with OSC and Kentucky. In addition, Boston University will manage several senior consultants that work on projects with partners and support travel and participant costs in a unified way across EPIC.
Management
Coordination and planning
Boston University will have overall responsibility for coordination and planning activities in EPIC. This includes support for the leadership team and partner all-hands meetings; external advisory committee meetings; reporting and documentation of the project.
The PI, Roscoe Giles, Jennifer Teig von Hoffman and Raquell Holmes will be involved with monthly meetings with the leadership team to determine the overall direction of the partnership. These meetings and plans will support the ability of the partnership to flexibly respond to the needs of the user communities and determine materials and infrastructure needed to ensure the success and dissemination of partnership activities and products. Dr. Holmes will oversee the modification of the Online Metrics tool to ensure its usefulness in the collection of partnership metrics that will be incorporated into reports on the activity and productivity of the partnership.
EOT lead support
Boston University will cover the expenses of face- to- face meetings of the leadership team and all-hands meeting for the partners. This will include facility, equipment and materials associated with such meetings.
Projects
Web Site and Public Relations
Ed Boyce of Boston University will continue to lead the coordination of resources and articles that are posted to EPIC website. The EPIC website will be an evolution of the current EOTPACI website. The website team, composed of personnel from NCSA, UCSD and Boston University, will pursue modifications of the website that ensure 1) materials and resources are accessible via NSDL compliant meta-tags and 2) incorporate a knowledge network that enables users to see and find related human and topical resources. Ed Boyce will participate in bi-weekly development meetings and weekly interactions with partners to ensure that their resources are documented and visible within the website framework. Textual materials will be revised, augmented and published in pamphlets and brochures as needed for distribution by partners at their respective meetings and conferences.
Visualize Education
This project seeks to enable educators to create materials that use rich 3D interactive collaborative environments to allow students to explore simulations and other data.
BU will investigate methods of using models in socially shared spaces in the HPC lab and invite a group of teachers and students to experience model based learning in our lab, based on the best prototypes available from VizEd collaborators. Participants will be surveyed in order to capture information regarding the usefulness and further improvements needed for the system. Ed Boyce will lead the collection of 3D models from partners (NCSA, SDSC, EdCenter at SDSU) to ensure that they are available to collaborating developers and users.
Training Modules
In the next year, the training staff will collaborate with partners at OSC and Kentucky to identify institutions, contact individuals, and work with instructors to determine criteria, course improvements, and customization for MPI curriculum use. Staff will be involved in the development learning objects that could be dynamically integrated by the student to fit their needs and in the modification of the current MPI-1 curriculum to include MPI-2.
Work with Minority Serving Institutions
Jennifer Teig von Hoffman will act as liaison with minority serving institution on Access Grid training.
Computational Science Education
Teacher Professional Development
Professional development workshops for teachers and the use of models in science education will be held in the Maryland and Pittsburgh areas. Consultants will be hired to implement train the trainer models and ensure that past and new computational models for the k-12 curricula are available via CDs and partner websites.
Computational Science and Engineering
Scott Lathrop will consult on the development of the EPIC website and interactions with the developers of the knowledge network tool, IKNOW. Mr. Lathrop will also consult in collaboration with Shodor foundation and SRI, Inc. on the development of a Computational Science and Engineering Workshop that will develop strategies for the broader adoption of CS&E methods in K-20 education.
Computational Cell Biology
Dr. Holmes will lead the development of web based training materials for undergraduate faculty and cell biology researchers. These materials will be utilized in sessions for cell biologists at the American Society for Cell Biology and tested within computational science education workshops hosted by BioQUEST and other EPIC partners.
Collaborative Research: EPIC - Engaging People in Cyberinfrastructure
Visualize Education – SDSU Scope of Work
K-12 and undergraduate students are developing more sophisticated expectations for the realism of modeling and simulation in their course work. This is due primarily to increasingly more advanced realism being found in today's computer games. Game development tools and rendering engines are now readily available with outstanding near-photo realistic quality and massive mult-user support. With some insight and forethought, this technology may be leveraged within the K-12 and undergraduate curriculum to provide students added engagement for learning and increased motivation to better understand the complex systems represented by these realistic simulations.
The San Diego State University Education Center on Computational Science and Engineering (ECCSE) proposes to evaluate a small number of existing "off-the-shelf" development tools and prototypes that may offer the potential for advanced multi-user simulation-based learning experiences. These tools to be evaluated will be selected from a list that includes:
Croquet
OGRE Butterfly
Shockwave3D
Java3D
Web3D
Visual Studio w. OpenGL libraries
Python 3D
Our metrics of evaluation will consist of a project rubric based on issues such as ease of development, interface features, multi-user support, scalability, performance, cross-platform support, and whether they are open source or proprietary. Based on a brief but thorough initial assessment, a subset consisting of the most promising tools will be used to develop a small number of prototype lessons using educational 3D interactive computational models for K-12 and undergraduate instruction. These lessons will then be field-tested by K-12 teachers and undergraduate professors. We have had success already with university faculty through our Faculty Fellows program. At the K-12 level, the ECCSE will work directly with the City Heights Educational Collaborative to introduce these prototype lessons to students at Hoover High School, Monroe-Clark Middle School, and Rosa Parks Elementary School in the San Diego area. Outcomes of these field test experiences will be documented with surveys and video interviews.
The importance of facilitating opportunities to field-test these prototype lessons at the undergraduate level cannot be overemphasized. This is why we would also like to propose to support one faculty fellowship wherein an undergraduate professor is given release time and undergraduate student intern support to help with the appropriate application of these tools into the curriculum. These fellowships and internships would be available during summer 2005.
The results of lesson development and field experience will serve as the basis for two workshops to be offered in either Fall 2005 or early Spring 2006. The goals of these workshops would be to:
Share the results of our field tests,
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Demonstrate the capabilities of these tools for science and engineering education,
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Provide hands-on experience with some of these tools, and
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Provide insight into how students, K-12 educators, and university faculty members might use these tools in classes.
From these workshops we expect to identify areas within the curriculum that necessitate the use of 3D interactive multi-user simulation environments. Based on these results, during the remainder of 2005 and 2006 the prototype lessons will be modified and used as the basis for further development in order to demonstrate the important role played by multi-user simulation environments.
Shodor Education Foundation Statement of Work
The efforts of the Shodor Foundation with these funds will be to bridge the vertical gap between computational science education workshops for pre-college and college faculty. In the first year, we will work to develop the materials and offer workshops during the summer of 2005. We will then work through the academic year (Sep ’05 – May ’06) to assist teachers in incorporating materials into their everyday classroom experiences. Our other funding from DUE allows us to do training exclusively for undergraduate faculty through the National Computational Science Institute (NCSI). We have found that the same workshops would serve pre-college faculty, and so we need to focus our efforts on bringing them into the same training and enhancement experiences. At the same time, we have a number of internships for college and high school students who will help create and maintain the materials for these workshops and for the newly funded Pathway project to the National Science Digital Library, supporting expansion of the Computational Science Education Reference Desk, originally funded by EOT-PACI. These internships have proven to attract women and minorities into computational science areas when they matriculate at the undergraduate level. We are working to incorporate more training for these students into the internship experience.

TACC Statement of Work
Collaborative Research: EPIC - Engaging People in Cyberinfrastructure
PI: Dr. Jay Boisseau, TACC Director Participants: Dr. Edward Walker, Distributed & Grid Computing Group Manager
Ms. Tina Romanella de Marquez, Communications & Development Manager
The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) has become one of the leading academic advanced computing centers in the nation over the past three years, with tremendous growth in staff, funding, resources, and R&D activities. Much of this growth has been due to a focus on participating in cyberinfrastructure projects. TACC is participating in three major cyberinfrastructure deployments, including the NSF TeraGrid. During the past year, TACC has been building education, outreach and training (EOT) activities to ensure that its R&D, resources, and services activities have the maximum possible impact on broader communities.
TACC has a comprehensive training program for advanced computing users that includes workshops in parallel computing, scientific visualization, and grid computing. TACC teaches more than 10 such workshops per year, training 200-300 users to use TACC resources more effectively. A new, complementary TACC EOT activity involves the creation of academic classes in advanced computing targeted for both graduate and upper-level undergraduate students in science and engineering (as opposed to computer science) disciplines. These classes will present theoretical foundations but also provide a strong applied context, so that the material is of immediate value in their research or post-graduate careers. TACC is already teaching the first course, “Parallel Computing for Science & Engineering,” and is thereby educating the next generation of researchers at a much deeper level than typical training classes (which are usually 1-2 days) on how to use parallel computing systems effectively for scientific research. TACC is developing three complementary classes: “Visualization for Science & Engineering,” “Data-Intensive Computing for Science & Engineering,” and “Distributed & Grid Computing for Science & Engineering.” The comprehensive four-course sequence will expand the effect of the first class by preparing future researchers to use many kinds of advanced computing resources, including those in the various cyberinfrastructure projects in which TACC is participating. This proposed sequence has been well-received by various faculty at UT Austin, who have offered to promote it, incorporate it in degree programs, and help teach the classes.
As part of the EPIC proposal, TACC will generalize and distribute content from both its training workshops and academic classes, focusing on the grid computing classes, and refine based on feedback from EPIC participants. This material will then be made available the community at large. This content will help new generations of researchers at other universities learn to deploy and use cyberinfrastructure for research and education.
Project: Collaborative Research: EPIC - Engaging People in Cyberinfrastructure
CEEE Diversity and Education Initiatives for EPIC
Partner(s): National Computational Science Alliance, Coalition to Diversify Computing, University of Miami, San Diego Supercomputer Center, University of Wisconsin at Madison, Boston University, Maryland Virtual High School Audience: Middle school and high school teachers and their students; minority undergraduate students, and the EPIC and cyberinfrastructure community
Overall Description
The goals of the overarching, multi-institutional effort known as “Collaborative Research: EPIC - Engaging People in Cyberinfrastructure” is to build human capacity by creating awareness and by educating and training a diverse group of people, including women, minorities, and persons with disabilities, in all stages of life from K-12 to professional practice to fully participate in the cyberinfrastructure community as developers, users, and leaders. This is a natural and strengthening goal for the original Education, Outreach and Training Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (EOT-PACI) team and its new partners through EPIC.
Rice University’s Center for Excellence and Equity in Education’s (CEEE), one of the founding organizations of EOT-PACI, has a mission to promote greater participation of underrepresented groups in the sciences, and to encourage academic excellence for all. Rice is well poised to be a part of the new EPIC program, and has four primary initiatives through which it will participate. It is important to note hat Rice plans to work within the entire EPIC endeavor on issues concerning education and diversity, which are woven through the specific programs described below.
Working with EPIC partners across the nation, Rice will build a community of minority undergraduate scholars at majority institutions, who face particular challenges, such as being the sole person of color in a classroom, or the first person in their family to enter college. Minority students enter STEM degree programs only to switch to more welcoming fields, such as the social sciences. Rice will hold a Summit on Scholarly Pursuits for EPIC minority students, including motivational lectures and research presentations from minority scholars, early in the year, matching students to mentors throughout EPIC and from other national minority programs. Throughout the year, the minority scholars will participate EPIC meetings; interact with colleagues in other programs, such as the Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate, and serve in leadership roles on national conferences and committees. Students will be required to provide candid feedback on their experiences within EPIC and academia in general, so that EPIC can be improved upon as needed.
Rice will work with the Coalition to Diversify Computing, another EPIC partner, on their undergraduate programs, including helping to locate students and faculty members to participate in CDC’s conference support program. Through this CDC mentors and their students will participate in the aforementioned Rice University Summit on Scholarly Pursuits, and attend the Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing in the fall, to provide them the opportunity to meet with national leaders who have an interest in their success. Rice will also work with the CDC on its “Distributed Rap Session,” providing assistance in locating speakers throughout the year.
In support of diversity and education at the K-12 program, Rice University will pilot a summer program for middle school teachers and students, fashioned after its successful three-year CS-CAMP program, which focused on high school students. CS-CAMP provides a female-centric environment where students gain confidence as they learn about computer science. During the high school CS-CAMP program, teachers and girls indicated that a program targeted at middle schools would have an even greater impact on the girls’ interests in STEM disciplines and in computing, as middle school is often the time when girls lose their interest, or are discouraged, from studying STEM subjects or seeing themselves in a STEM-related career. Past participants in CS-CAMP will be invited to attend this year’s program, to serve as mentors and to develop additional computer skills. Another EPIC partner, the Maryland Virtual High School, will send master teachers to Houston to participate in the CS-CAMP program, sharing their experiences and resources.
As mentoring is a significant part of the success of students of all ages, Rice will partner the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, the University of Miami, and the San Diego Supercomputer Center to conduct a national summit on virtual mentoring to identify the challenges of virtual mentoring and to recommend strategies for effective mentoring through the development and application of emerging cyberinfrastructure technologies. Tremendous success has been achieved through face-to-face mentoring of diverse communities across all age levels and across multiple learning and working environments. Yet there are many people, especially people under-represented in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) communities, who are not being mentored and who are therefore not achieving their full potential. The emergence of innovative communications and collaboration technologies, such as the Access Grid, IKNOW knowledge networks, iLabs for online interactions, and on-line mentoring environments afford exciting new opportunities to reach under-served populations and broaden the opportunities for mentoring. A series of white papers will be written and interviews will be conducted prior to the summit to identify the key issues for discussions during the summit. Following the summit a steering committee will develop proposals to secure funding for the development of virtual mentoring programs designed to work with underrepresented students nationwide, and to inspire them to become part of the STEM and cyberinfrastructure community.
Broad Impacts
Every Rice University program within EPIC is designed to have a broad impact. Rice has a long history of success working on diversity and education programs, and will bring that experience to bear on EPIC’s goal. Information about EPIC programs will be broadly disseminated through several channels, including professional societies, partners’ newsletters, publications, conferences, and Websites. Additional proposals and partnerships will be sought with those interested in the CEEE mission.
Statement of Work: Osman Yaşar,
National Computational Science Curriculum
Experimentation with undergraduate computational math, science, and technology (CMST) education has been limited to less than a dozen programs nationally. A similar trend can be said for graduate-level CMST education, though issues differ significantly. After carefully observing, reviewing, and publishing our findings in the community about current state of CMST education, we can comfortably say that a major difficulty in implementation and dissemination of CMST education has been the lack of necessary human capacity on a single campus. Courses that integrate CMST tools into application fields (science, engineering, business, and humanities) are not fully developed. This problem gets compounded with another difficulty related to preparation of students in several fields (math, programming tools, and applications) within usual disciplinary timeframes. A solution to this has not been found yet. Development of student learning outcomes, a well-defined curriculum and a collection of ‘tools’ and ‘application’ courses is essential to successfully implement a CMST program. Computational science programs need to either engage more disciplinary faculty in their campuses or collaborate with each other via distance learning and other digital repositories to enrich resources offered locally. Resources would be needed to engage remotely located programs in local improvements to course, curriculum, and human capacity. Resources for increasing student capacity, via graduate assistantships and scholarships, are also needed to ensure quantity and quality of a student body engaged in a multi-disciplinary field that requires a great deal of focus and management skills (knowledge, time).
Of seven national Bachelor-degree programs reported by Swanson (www.krellinst.org), there is one B.S. program in computational science, three B.S. programs in computational math, and three B.S. in computational physics. Still remained as the only B.S. program in computational science, SUNY Brockport is interested in taking its experience to the national level in an effort to both disseminate its experience and also collectively seek solutions to a national problem. Brockport has not benefited from the national CI programs. The proposed collaboration under EPIC program, particularly with Landau and Moses, would be strong evidence of engaging diverse communities in realizing the vision of CI. Access to advanced CI technologies would enhance our program’s capacity. In return, by utilizing the EOT-NPACI network, Brockport’s experience in CMST education as well as in NSF’s Math and Science Partnership program could promote CMST approach with CI community to improve math and science education at a national level.
This proposal seeks collaboration with programs at Oregon State University (Landau), University of Wisconsin-Madison (Moses) to establish a national computational science curriculum and also to demonstrate sharing of resources at both short and large distances. We will also seek collaboration with Istanbul Technical University (Dag) to demonstrate practicality of remote learning at large distances. Outside consultants and private national computational science institutes will also be included in dissemination of course materials.
SDSC Education Projects
October 12, 2004
Activity 1: Humanities Cyberinfrastructure Summer Institute
Goal: Introduce CI technology to Humanities academics. Lead: Donald Frederick Participants: Natasha Balac, EOT staff Leverage: Use existing SDSC CI projects (e.g., in Portals, Collection Management tools (SRB) ). Workshop would be made available live over Web-cast and asynchronously, as streaming video. This will be a joint EOT/CIP project and will include some modest funding support from SDSC core (e.g., $10K). Audience: University academics in Humanities, Arts and other fields Overview: CI is anticipated but still largely unknown, and unexplored in academic fields outside of traditional HPC users, such as Humanities, Social Sciences, etc.
Task 1a: Convene 1-day CI Humanities Access Grid Discussion, with HASTAC Community and CI developers to provide CI tools builders with information on needs, and skill sets of Humanities.
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Task 1b: Conduct Humanities CI Needs Assessment via HASTAC mailing list. Results would be used in designing Summer Institute program
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Task 1c: Develop outreach/advertising for institute
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Task 1d: Develop program for Institute (e.g., via program committee)
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Task 1e: Host week-long Humanities Summer Institute. Includes lectures on CI, and relevant tools, hands-on workshop sessions. Each attendee will be required to bring a project (building prototype collection, portal or their own research). A total of 60 participants would be accepted, housing would be provided and modest travel stipends.
Activity 2: TeacherTECH Program
Goal: To reach an important component of education outreach- the educator, by offering workshops and hands on instruction to enable the use of CI technology in the classroom from its most basic use to more advanced software and tools. Lead: Ange Mason Participants: Anne Bowen, Apryl Bailey, Mike Senise (San Diego City Schools), Steve Grant (San Diego City Schools) Leverage: Leverage SDSC’s vast array of resources and scientific research to promote technology in the K-12 classroom Audience: San Diego County K-12 educators: San Diego county middle school students
Overview: This effort will focus on four key deliverables
Task 2a: TeacherTECH Science Series- held monthly beginning in January, these two-hour workshops will be open to K-12 educators across San Diego County. The format will include lecture and hands on activities focused on
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chemistry, bioinformatics, earth science and scientific visualization. Each workshop will be web cast and videotaped for future web archiving.
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Task 2b: TeacherTECH 2005- development of two 1-week sessions that have not previously been offered. The first session will be based on the teachers-teaching-teachers formula in which participants will learn how to bring their technology skills back to their particular school or district as a means of training other educators. The second session will be an extension of our TeacherTECH Science Series.
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Task 2c: TeacherTECH User Group- a follow up resource held monthly for past TeacherTECH participants as a forum for questions and further project development
Activity 3: Education Data Portal
Goal: Make scientific data collections broadly accessible to the national community, with a particular emphasis on making data collections accessible and usable by high-school and undergraduate science teachers.
Lead: Anke Kamrath Participants: Natasha Balac, Jesus Castegnetto, EOT Team Leverage: Leverage SDSC’s data applications staff expertise, established data collections, and storage resources to bring this project to fruition quickly (e.g., 1 year time-frame). Audience: High-school and undergraduate science teachers
Overview: SDSC’s houses many, many scientific data collections. This effort will focus on three key deliverables:
Task 3a: Development of general web-based interface to support broad community access to SDSC’s community data collections and databases. As appropriate we will integrate with and develop relevant metadata with key educationally-oriented digital library efforts, including CDL, NSDL and DLESE.
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Task 3b: Evaluate several large-scale data efforts (GEON, NEES, BIRN, PDB) to identify common access modes to facilitate use by high-school and undergraduate teachers. A prototype collection will be selected and a prototype education portal interface will be developed. This portal and the use thereof will be integrated into the TeacherTECH program described above.
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Task 3c: Coordinate with the NSDL to register relevant SDSC data collections to provide broad access to the national educational community.
Statement of Work: Rubin Landau,
Conversion of Computational Science Classes to Distance Delivery
Swanson ( www.krellinst.org/learningcenter/CSE_survey/) lists seven Bachelor-degree programs as existent nationally in all of the computational sciences. Landau has introduced and developed one such program for a B.S. degree in Computational Physics at Oregon State University, with new courses at all levels of instruction. Much of the curriculum materials will be contained in either a textbook for lower-division students, or a separate one for upper-division students. The former is to be published by Princeton University Press in 2005, and the latter to have an updated version published by Wiley-Interscience in 2006.
In order to scale this wealth of material to a national level, and to ensure the longevity of all computational programs, Landau proposes to start converting some of his computational classes to distance delivery. Just which ones is still under consideration; the lower-level courses may have the widest impact, but the higher-level ones may, otherwise, be the most difficult to introduce at another school. Landau was a Co-PI’s on the original, 1995 Metacenter grant at OSU studying the use of the Web for scientific and educational purposes, and so have some experience in this area. However, there has been tremendous advances made by Greg Moses’s group at the University of Wisconsin (eteach.engr.wisc.edu/newEteach/), and we propose collaborating with them.
This project is viewed as just the first step in a collaborative effort with Osman Yasar of SUNY Brockport, and Greg Moses. Yasar directs an independent undergraduate degree program in Computational Science, as well as the Computational Math, Science and Technology Institute, which extends to middle and high school teachers. We envision sharing courses between our universities, then branching out to other schools, and eventually having enough materials to support a variety of full degree programs.
Science Enrichment Program
A partnership with Girl Scouts to bring science to girls nationally.
Rozeanne Steckler, PhD Director of Education Northwest Alliance for Computational Science and Engineering
The goal of the Science Enrichment program is to provide informal science education for K-8 girls who are member of groups underrepresented in the fields of science and engineering. Through this project, we are making the kids enthusiastic about science and providing them with the analogies and points of contact to help them succeed in their formal science and math education. The project uses weekly hands-on science lessons, family science nights, Science Saturdays, and summer day camps to reach the target audience. Girls are served in a variety of settings including schools, homeless shelters, HUD sites, juvenile detention facilities, and Boys and Girls Clubs. The Science Enrichment program is currently serving a total of approximately 10,000 girls in the cities of Houston, Atlanta, and San Diego. In fall 2004, Portland is adopting the program for underserved girls in their community. The project and its replication have been evaluated by the LEAD center through EOT/PACI. This invaluable feedback has enabled us to refine and grow the program. In the upcoming year we propose to further develop the program in Portland and add a computer science portion to the programs in both Portland and Atlanta. In each of these cities, the councils have been supplied with science kits and curriculum tailored to the needs of their girls, however neither has the laptop computers that are in use in both Houston and San Diego. The computers give urban girls an opportunity to explore the use of a computer and get comfortable with its use. This is vital since many of these girls do not have regular access in their schools.