This award made on an EAGER proposal supports a novel pilot summer school project designed to help integrate computation in Materials Science and Engineering Departments across the Nation. The Summer School for Integrated Computational Materials Education will be designed to rapidly increase the incorporation of computational materials science to those universities that lack the resources to implement them on their own, including primarily teaching universities. It will train future instructors who are capable of introducing CMSE to undergraduate students. The Summer School will train graduate students who are interested in but not necessarily familiar with computational approaches, allowing them additional tools in pursuing their materials research. Therefore, the Summer School will have impact on both undergraduate and graduate education.
Computational approaches have transformed many scientific and engineering disciplines in the last decade. They are beginning to produce widespread impact in the design and development of new materials. A recent survey performed and published in JOM - the journal of the Minerals, Metals, and Materials Society, as well as the National Academy of Engineering Report, "Integrated Computational Materials Engineering: A Transformational Discipline for Improved Competitiveness and National Security" indicate the need for integration of computational techniques into undergraduate Materials Science and Engineering curricula.
To address the challenges in this integration, the PIs will design and organize a pilot program of "Summer School for Integrated Computational Materials Education," which will be a two-week program that includes a "crash course" on computational materials science and engineering and focus sessions on educational modules that can be adopted into existing core courses. The PIs will target the introduction of computational tools into undergraduate-level thermodynamics course. Successful participants in the program, Fellows, will be ambassadors of computational materials science and engineering; they will teach segments of the thermodynamics course using the modules and methods presented in the Summer School.
The PI will build a strong team consisting of professors, software developers, and industrial researchers. The summer school will also include advanced topics from the forefront of computational materials research, which provides a forum for dissemination of state-of-the-art research. The participants will learn about computational tools that could be incorporated into their research. The Summer School will also provide a case study for a method for transforming undergraduate education to embrace technology in a STEM subject.
This EAGER award has potential for high impact on an important problem and to transform the field of materials science and engineering.
Computational approaches have transformed many scientific and engineering disciplines in the last decade. For example, Computer Aided Design is widely applied by mechanical engineers, and petascale computing has enabled simulations of stars, novae, supernovae, galaxies, and even the birth of the universe, to advance our scientific understanding of astronomy and cosmology. In the field of materials science and engineering (MSE), modern methods of computational materials science are also beginning to produce widespread impact in design and development. Integrated Computational Materials Engineering (ICME) has thus emerged as a new subdiscipline of materials science and engineering, which aims to impact the full materials design, processing, and component manufacturing cycle by integration of multiple computational tools with data derived from experimental and computer simulation studies. With the growing interest in ICME, a variety of computational tools are now either available or under rapid development. Unfortunately, materials science education has not kept up with the rapid change in this field. Most materials science and engineering undergraduate curricula lack computational training beyond freshman programming courses, which are often disconnected from materials engineering problems. As such, graduates often enter the workforce without knowing how computational tools can be applied to solve practical materials engineering problems in research and development. To address the challenges in integrating computational techniques into the undergraduate MSE curricula, the Summer School for Integrated Computational Materials Education was held at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan in the summers of 2011 and 2012. This two-week program included a crash course on computational materials science and engineering and focus sessions on educational modules that would be adopted into existing undergraduate-level core MSE curricula. These modules were designed to introduce computational tools as well as to deepen understanding of key concepts. Nearly 50 participants attended the 2011-2012 Summer Schools, including faculty, postgraduate researchers, and graduate students from materials science and engineering departments and programs across the country. The Summer School participants learned both the theory and practical application of computational approaches in MSE, so that they can help integrate these techniques into the undergraduate curricula at their home institutions. Two short courses were also held in conjunction with conferences to highlight some of the materials developed. To assess the Summer School’s impact on undergraduate MSE education, a survey of past participants was conducted in September 2013 to determine how many had implemented the modules or used other Summer School content in the curricula at their home institutions. As estimated by these participants, over 660 students have been impacted by the content developed by the Summer School, nearly 540 of whom were undergraduates, demonstrating that the Summer School is having a significant impact on hundreds of young materials scientists and engineers by introducing them to computational techniques early in their education. We have also created a website to enable broader distribution of the modules. The website allows users to download the module lectures (both review lectures emphasizing concepts aimed at undergraduates and more advanced lectures intended to give instructors more detailed information on each of the models), hands-on walkthroughs to teach users how to use the software tools, module problem sets, and any necessary supplementary files, such as images or script files. The website is accessible to the public at the following website. https://sites.google.com/a/umich.edu/icmedresources/
