Interdisciplinary (99) This project builds upon the successful regional Shodor Computational Science Institute (SCSI) to create a National Computational Science Institute (NCSI). Reaching more than 1000 undergraduate faculty per year for three years, NCSI offers a proven, modular set of in-person, video-conferenced, and web-accessible workshops, seminars, and support activities to introduce the hands-on use of computational science, numerical models and data visualization tools across the undergraduate curriculum. This project represents a partnership with the Education, Outreach and Training Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure, the National Computational Science Education Consortium, the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, and more than two dozen undergraduate institutions, high performance computing centers and vendors.
The target audience for NCSI is teams of faculty from predominantly undergraduate institutions, minority serving institutions, and community colleges whose students are either the next generation of scientists and engineers, the next generation of K-12 teachers, or both. NCSI participants then assist other faculty on their own campuses and at neighboring institutions to introduce computational science in their own classes.
The main work of NCSI is accomplished through three synergistic but distinct efforts 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 education onto the agendas of numerous annual meetings of professional and discipline-specific societies, by offering workshops, conducting tutorials, presenting papers and posters, and serving on program committees. To sustain these efforts, NCSI PERMEATEs on-going and proposed undergraduate curriculum efforts providing interdisciplinary and discipline specific web-accessible courses for faculty enhancement, and resources for interactive exploration including curriculum, problem-based modeling modules, tools, and tutorials, leveraging Shodor's award-winning Computational Science Education Reference Desk.
