Extensive summer workshops and six Saturday meetings during the academic year helped sustain and extend the level of familiarity with the available tools so the teachers could confidently begin to include computational examples in their classroom lessons. The Saturday meetings also provided a mechanism for feedback from the participants to aid in designing the next summers workshop.

In the 1993 summer workshop, the STEP teachers became confident in using electronic mail and information gathering tools on the Unix-based computer accounts donated by UCSD and CERFnet. The computational science tools included spreadsheets for standard problems in chemistry, biology and physics, as well as the MATLAB computing environment for programming and graphics on the Macintosh or PC.

The effects on individual teachers varies as much as the teachers themselves. STEP introduced participants to an ever increasing level of sophisticated tools over the three year period, while at the same time giving them the freedom to make individual decisions on what would work best in their particular school environment.

At Supercomputing 93, Stewart and lead teacher Olin Elliot presented a poster about STEP and met several researchers whom Stewart invited to STEPs 1994 summer workshop. The teachers benefitted from exposure to all these tools, which are detailed in Question 3, by seeing the many possibilities for approaching problem solving and being able to select the most appropriate tools for their classrooms. To bring this workshop to closure, the teachers identified possible projects they felt could take advantage of one or more of these tools. This list is available at:

http://www-step.ucsd.edu/projects.html

Two lasting benefits of the program were the end of isolation, frequently felt by teachers, and a stronger comfort level with computation. Through electronic mail, teachers could contact fellow STEP members or the instructors. STEP united the teachers at each school as they worked as a team on their projects, but perhaps even more importantly, helped build camaraderie among all the teachers in STEP.

And because of the confidence the STEP teachers have developed over the three years, their students and their peers are being given first-hand evidence of how computational science can be incorporated effectively in the high school classroom. As this increased understanding fans out through society, the effects on science education and science in everyday life will be tremendous.