The Shodor Education Foundation announces the creation of The National
Computational Science Institute (NCSI). NCSI expands the already popular
regional workshops known as the Shodor Computational Science Institute
(SCSI). At over 18 partner sites across the country, NCSI introduces
the hands-on use of computational science, numerical models, and data
visualization tools across the curriculum.
The National Science Foundation has awarded a three-year, $2.75M grant
(Award Number: DUE-0127488) enabling NCSI to offer a national set of
in-person, video-conferenced, and web-accessible workshops, seminars,
and support activities. The initial target audience for NCSI are teams of
faculty from predominantly undergraduate institutions (PUI's), minority
serving institutions (MSI's), and community colleges whose students
are either the next generation of scientists and engineers, the next
generation of K-12 teachers, or both. With supplemental funding, NCSI
plans to offer computational science workshops and sponsor educational
activities for in-service teachers, business and government leaders,
and the general public. NCSI participants then assist others
on their own campuses and at neighboring institutions to introduce
computational science in their own classes. NCSI proceeds along
three synergistic but distinct routes that can be modeled as PULL,
PUSH, and PERMEATE.
Regionally distributed workshops
PULL faculty within a reasonable travel
distance for a week of intense interdisciplinary training, collaboration,
and curriculum development in computational science. Participants
explore the use of modeling and visualization tools in existing courses,
while stimulating creation of new courses and promoting new modes of
undergraduate research. NCSI staff and participants proactively
PUSH computational science and computational
science education onto the agendas of professional and discipline-specific
societies, offer workshops, conduct tutorials, present papers and posters,
and serve on program committees. To sustain these efforts, NCSI works to PERMEATE on-going and proposed undergraduate
curriculum efforts with computational science content. NCSI develops
and provides interdisciplinary and discipline specific web-accessible
courses for faculty enhancement, such as Computational Chemistry
for Chemistry Educators, and resources for interactive exploration
including interactive curricula, problem-based modeling modules, tools,
and tutorials.
Shodor's award-winning
Computational Science Education
Reference Desk serves as the organizing structure for dissemination
of NCSI materials.
NCSI operates in partnership with the Education, Outreach and Training Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (EOT-PACI), The National Center for Supercomputing Applications, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Clemson University, Appalachian State University, the National Computational Science Education Consortium (NCSEC), the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, Sigma Xi, the North Carolina Supercomputing Center, and more than two dozen academic institutions, high performance computing centers and vendors.
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