STEP Overview

Your Organization: San Diego Supercomputer Center

Your Application: Supercomputer Teacher Enhancement Program (STEP)

Contact: Dr. Kris Stewart, San Diego State University

Please describe your application and the information technology used in conjunction with it. Please keep your language simple and your explanations non-technical. Your project will be judged primarily for what it does and for its impact on people.

Science and technology have advanced so quickly in recent years that high school teachers find it difficult to keep themselves and their students up to date. Science is created in the research laboratory, disseminated in research journals, distilled into undergraduate courses and taught to education students who then take this knowledge into the high school classroom. By the time science trickles down from the laboratory to the high school classroom, it can be years behind the state-of-the-art. And unlike other fields, such as nursing, secondary school teachers do not always have the same stringent continuing education required of them nor the continuing education resources available to them.

The Supercomputer Teacher Enhancement Program (STEP) was established to help teachers keep up with the rapid developments in science. A three-year program, STEP introduced more than 40 high school teachers from 19 schools to a sampling of the many tools in the evolving world of computational science, including the use of networking software. Funded by the National Science Foundation and administered jointly by the Univeristy of California, SanDiego (UCSD) and the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), STEP used the decentralized, grassroots approach of continuing education to narrow the gap between state-of-the-art science and classroom experience.

Initially organized in 1992 by Dr. Robert Dean, from the Program for Teacher Enhancement (PTEST) at UCSD Extension, STEP recruited groups of teachers who could become self-sufficient in using information technology to stay abreast of the latest scientific developments. STEP formed groups at each school, rather than individuals, to provide the "critical mass" to make the teams self-sustaining and to pass on their new skills to other teachers. In selecting schools, STEP targeted those with significant student populations from minority groups that have not traditionally enrolled in undergraduate science and engineering majors.

In applying to the program, teachers indicated they had access to, at least, a Macintosh or IBM PC computer, a modem, and a phone line; each teacher's principal certified this contribution on the school's part. A small group of "lead teachers" were then chosen from the applicant pool to coordinate with groups of teachers from three to six schools in the same geographic area. The lead teachers worked with the program coordinator and primary instructor, Dr. Kris Stewart of San Diego State University and SDSC throughout the entire program beginning with the developmental stages in early 1993.

During three summer workshops, STEP showed the teachers some of the scientific tools available for the Macintosh and PC on the Internet, such as NIH Image for scientific visualization and the extensive satellite data repositories from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory - but only to whet their appetites. The real effort went into teaching them how to find this data themselves.

The three years of continuing education focused on computational science but could only be planned by Stewart one year at a time due to the dynamic nature of Information Technology, computational science tools, and the individual comfort level of the STEP participants. Similarly, appropriate expert instructors were invited by Stewart to attend the STEP summer workshops to present overviews of their tools and work with the STEP participants. An outside evaluator, Dr. Karen Cohen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology attended many of the meetings and interacted with the participants and the instructors to provide accessment of progress towards the project's original goals, detailed in the response to Question 3. The entire project is overseen by the principal investigator, Dr. Don Anderson of UCSD, who provided vision and ensured the UCSD faculty and infrastructure could provide needed support.

STEP had to deal with the effort involved in bringing state-of-the-art technology to high schools that lacked such basic information infrastructure as phone lines in the classrooms. In part because the STEP participants showed they could use the Internet to real teaching advantage, many of their school districts took the plunge and installed network and Internet connections in classrooms. SDSC staff supported the project's effort to bridge this technological gap by providing computational science resources and expertise.

The STEP teachers directly reach more than 6,800 students, nearly two-thirds of whom are from minorities underrepresented in the sciences, and have also acquainted more than 1,700 peers with developments in telecommunications, computational science, and networking. To help as many teachers as possible apply the tools of computational science, STEP participants conducted in-service training sessions back at their own schools and special tutorial sessions at the Supercomputing '95 conference held in San Diego. STEP teachers also contributed poster exhibits to the 1993 and 1994 Supercomputing conferences.

The recent focus is on using the Wide World Web and browsers such as Netscape Navigator and NCSA Mosaic. In 1995, Dr. Anderson began an ambitious program to instruct the STEP participants on how to become producers as well as consumers of Web material by searching the Web for public-domain graphics, text, and sound to include in stand-alone, browsable lessons for the classroom.

The answers to the five questions provide more details on the actual capabilities and activities of STEP and so will not be repeated here.