Education Poster Presentation
Supercomputing 1994
Washington, D.C.
November 13-18, 1994
Tim Towler
towler@sdcc14.ucsd.edu
Biology Instructor
San Diego High School
1405 Park Blvd.
San Diego, CA 92101
STEP Lead Teacher
Dr. Kris Stewart
stewart@sdsu.edu
Program Coordinator, STEP
Associate Professor, Mathematical Sciences
San Diego State University
Computational Science Curriculum Coordinator
San Diego Supercomputer Center
STEP is funded by National Science Foundation (E&HR UCSD 92-5943)
and is a joint project of the University of California, San Diego
(UCSD) and the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC).
The mission of STEP is to provide an opportunity for high school
science and math teachers from San Diego and Imperial Counties to
learn about the uses of computers in scientific research. There
is a special emphasis on the scaling of scientific problems from
microcomputers to supercomputers and all platforms in between.
Teams (2-4) of teachers from same school site
Primarily science teachers
Three years of continuing education in computational science
Intensive summer workshops
Saturday academic year meetings (6)
Over forty high school science teachers with significant underrepresented
student populations are participating in the instruction at SDSC.
As part of the program, STEP teachers provide staff development and have
reached over 1700 peers covering telecommuncations, computational
science, and networking during the first academic year of the program.
40 Participating Teachers, 5 Lead Teacher representing 19 different schools
1 Atypical (7-12) High School
2 Junior High Schools
16 Comprehensive High Schools
13 are women
10 are from underrepresented groups
12 teach bilingual or sheltered classes
These teachers reach roughly 6860 students of which 65% are from
underrepresented groups. The majority of these students are Limited
English Proficient.
Curriculum materials developed for the summer workshops are available
at the STEP WWW home page
http://iip.ucsd.edu/step/
1993 Four week introduction to programming, electronic communcations
(elm on UNIX machine with dial-in access) and computational tools
(MATLAB and spreadsheets)
1994 Three week workshop building on first summer's materials. Worked
with more advanced communication tools (PPP/Eudora) as well as an
introduction to new tools from:
Dave Thomas (Montana St. U.) - Visualization Tools
Brian Lindow (LLNL) - NESP
Tony Freeman (JPL) - Surface Imaging Radar
SDSC Staff (John Helly, Jayne Keller, Wayne
Pfeiffer, Jay Dombrowski, Andrea Alvarado)
CERFNet (Kent England, Susan Calcari)
Community of Explorers (Randy Souviney, TEP/UCSD)
1995 Three week workshop to reinforce tools and prepare to share
information at Supercomputing 1995
Diverse range of computing equipment used by participants at home site.
This ranges from isolated Mac's or PC's to networked computers in the
school classroom, depending on what the school provided since this was
not part of the STEP grant.
56 Kbaud direct link
dialin/local call
dialin/toll call (OCMS with Pacific Bell)
Due to changes in assignments (as well as "life"), six of the original
forty participants could not continue with STEP in year two. Each
school team was able to recruit an appropriate replacement and the
team was able to bring the new member up to speed with the group.
Last Edited July 17, 1995 by Tim Towler