Educational activities

Colorado Computational Science Fair

For the eighth consecutive year, SCD co-hosted the Colorado Computational Science Fair (CCSF) with Colorado State University to encourage high school students to learn more about computational science. The 2001 CCSF was held on May 12. Sixty-nine students from Colorado entered 33 projects into the competition with almost all of the projects using internet connections provided by NCAR during the fair. Group and individual projects were submitted in the areas of Information Technology, Computational Science, and Robotics. Student projects in computational science were grouped for judging based on the highest level math class the student has completed. Ten researchers from industry, universities and NCAR judged the student projects and provided written feedback.

More detail is on the web at http://www.scd.ucar.edu/ois/ccsf/index.html

Computing grants to classrooms

SCD continues to provide access to its supercomputers for undergraduate and graduate university classes. Computing resources are provided for students engaged in modeling and simulations requiring high performance computers, and for classes studying recently introduced architectures. SCD also provides computing resources to graduate students in the atmospheric and related sciences for their thesis research.

SC2000 education program

Ginger Caldwell, USS, was the Education Program Publications Chair for the SC2000 Education Program, "A National Computational Science Leadership Program" held during the SC2000 conference in Dallas, Texas on November 4-9, 2000. After developing the proposal for this NSF-funded program in 2000, the focus in FY2001 was on the planning for the conference. Twenty-five teacher teams of four teachers each participated in this program which had significant representation from low-wealth schools. Teachers received 40 hours of training in computational biology, chemistry, and physics at the SC2000 conference. Over $1 million in grants have been awarded for this program so far with half from NSF.

SCD's participation in this national program has ensured that we are aware of the outcomes and strategies for enhancing computational science leadership among secondary teachers.