This Pathway II project extends the Computational Science Education Reference Desk (CSERD), an interdisciplinary numerical models and interactive computing pathway. The continuation funding is enabling the establishment of a secure future by positioning CSERD to respond to shifts in web technologies and building a self-sustaining enterprise model.
CSERD partnerships with Sigma Xi, and national associations representing Hispanic, American Indian, and Historically Black Colleges and Universities, along with the SuperComputing conference, offers focused, customized faculty training for use of CSERD and NSDL resources across the curriculum. By leveraging partnerships with TeraGrid and the new XD program, CSERD is bringing underrepresented groups into the computational sciences, and by extension, to all STEM areas.
The Computational Science Education Reference Desk (CSERD) is a collaboration of Shodor, a national resource in computational science education; the National Computational Science Institute (NCSI) and several national partner institutions and organizations. From its initial inception, CSERD has developed into a complete digital learning template, including interactive resources, lessons, links to standards, curricula and assessments while maintaining persistent, high-quality, distributed learning resources. The overall goal of the Computational Science Education Reference Desk: Push, Pull, Permeate, Persist project is to push teachers and faculty to better teaching through effective use of technology and content training; to pull teachers and faculty into longer training experiences by offering real value-added professional development; to permeate the web with the best reviewed and supported materials across all disciplines and education levels; and to persist by constantly enhancing our resources and underlying computing technologies. Outcomes and Findings: Significant work has been accomplished during this project to position CSERD at the forefront of computational thinking. During year 1, we increased the outreach efforts for CSERD and in March 2010, we served 4.25 million web pages to 800,000 visitors. Throughout year 2, we continued to promote and raise the awareness of CSERD to faculty, teachers, educators, and learners. CSERD engaged key partners and collaborators to leverage its computational science resources and to build communities of learners in new content areas. Partnerships and collaborations include XSEDE: eXtreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment, Blue Waters, SuperComputing (SCXY) Education Program, HPC University, TeraGrid, and Pathways to Petascale. In December 2010, we successfully published the first issue of the Journal of Computational Science Education (JOCSE), an online journal. With submissions from both professionals and students, JOCSE promotes the research findings and use of computation in education. Materials accepted by JOCSE will be hosted on the JOCSE website, and will be catalogued by CSERD for inclusion in the National Science Digital Library. As leaders in education technology, Shodor is redesigning activities in CSERD’s award winning mathematics collection, Interactivate, to make use of the latest in networking technology to provide advanced computational education tools to students and educators. In June 2011, Shodor released its first product for Apple’s App store, Math Flyer (www.shodor.org/mathflyer). With Math Flyer, the user can plot a graph, and then interactively manipulate all of the variables and constants in that graph and see how these changes affect the graph. Shodor is also rewriting Interactivate activities to use the latest Javascript to make them compatible on other mobile and Smartphone devices such as Androids and BlackBerrys. Intellectual Merit: Interactivate activities have been successfully alignment to the Common Core Math Standards which will be adopted by 48 states and some territories. In addition, enhancements and improvements to CSERD metadata to ensure resources are Learning Application Ready (LAR) was completed. CSERD collections were expanded by the addition of portal projects for the sub-domains of computational science such as Computational Chemistry for Chemistry Educators (CCCE) and Computational Biology for Biology Educators (CBBE). Evaluation results show the use and perception of CSERD continues to remain high for students and educators. Participation and interest in training and presentations focusing on computational thinking remain high as well. CSERD resources are valued and used across multiple disciplines such as mathematics, chemistry, computer science, biological science, physics and engineering. CSERD has resonated with secondary instructors who are a strong user group of CSERD. Broader Impact: During the project, several partnerships were cultivated to attract underrepresented persons to STEM. Shodor and its partners in high performance computing have achieved a multi-cultural success story for achieving diversity in internships. One of the foremost challenges in high performance computing (HPC) is promoting involvement of historically underrepresented undergraduate students. The Blue Waters Undergraduate Petascale Education Program has been facing this challenge while supporting undergraduate internship experiences that involve the application of HPC to problems in the sciences, engineering or mathematics. As a result of evolving approaches to recruitment efforts for undergraduate interns and mentors as well as proactive program changes, we successfully generated a large, diverse applicant pool including substantial numbers of qualified women and minority candidates to participate in the two-week HPC institute. This award and efforts to create a broader audience for CSERD in the last two years, has resulted in the funding of other products and initiatives. Shodor has been selected to be a partner for the XSEDE: eXtreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment. The XSEDE project will bring advanced cyberinfrastructure, digital services, and expertise to the nation’s scientists and engineers. Shodor staff and student interns will work to bring Shodor’s computational science education projects to XSEDE, to help develop new curricular resources, to train faculty to approach computational thinking from a parallel perspective, and to build an outreach program capable of attracting more young people into the field by continuing its efforts in providing workshops, apprenticeships and internships.
