Article for Fall 93 College of Sciences Review (K. Stewart)
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The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) has begun an
ambitious program to form a bridge between the staff and
facilities of SDSC and the high school classroom through
STEP (Supercomputer Teacher Enhancement Program).  It has 
long been recognized that underrepresented groups such
as Latinos, Filipinos and African-Americans have not
chosen to pursue science and math to the extent that
other groups in America have.   STEP is attempting to
help 46 high school teachers in San Diego county who have
significant underrepresented student populations by bringing
these teachers to SDSC for summer workshops as well as
academic year follow on meetings to introduce them to the
modern tools of computational science.

The three year grant is funded by the National Science Foundation,
administered by UCSD Extension and has Dr. Kris Stewart of
SDSU's Mathematical Science Department as Program Coordinator.

Teams of teachers from the following high school districts
participated in STEP this past July:

Alta Vista High School & Vista High School
Bonita Vista High School
Carlsbad High School & Valley Junior High School
Chula Vista High School
Escondido High School
Gompers Secondary School
Hoover High School
Kearny High School
Lincoln Prep
Mar Vista High School
Mira Mesa High School
Morse High School
Mountain Empire High School
Oceanside High School
Point Loma High School
San Diego High School
San Dieguito High School
San Pasqual High School
Southwest High School

In the first, intensive four-week summer workshop held in July 1993, 
the teachers were introduced 

to programming through a one week introduction to C;

to telecommunications and the use of the Internet for electronic mail 
   and file transfers, via direct Internet connections and over
   the phone lines; 

to computational science through the use of cross platform software 
   such as Matlab (the teachers have Macintosh or PC on their desk
   and Matlab runs there as well as on Sun and SGI and Cray);

to the staff and facilities (Cray Y-MP, Intel Paragon, Scientific
   Visualization Laboratory, Computational Biology Laboratory) of
   the San Diego Supercomputer Center; and 

to CERFNet, which has donated CERFNet accounts for the teachers.

The second year of the grant has a focus on modeling, especially
modeling of environmental subjects.  It is thought that environmental
studies provide a cross-disciplinary forum that would involve
the high school teachers (and eventually their students) in projects
that use computational power to model situations that are of 
concern to everyone.

If there are any faculty or staff at SDSU who would be willing
to contribute some of their time to help with this project, please
contact Kris Stewart (stewart@cs.sdsu.edu).  Since most funding
agencies look favorably on educational outreach programs and
cross-disciplinary work, this is an opportunity for interested
SDSU faculty to assist a group of motivated and trained high
school teachers who do have the facilities of the San Diego
Supercomputer Center available to them.

We would be especially interested in any software that might be
usable in the high school classroom which typically consists of
a Macintosh or PC, as well as any environmentally oriented modeling 
that SDSU faculty have worked.  

In the broader realm, the teachers in STEP have courses in Chemistry, 
Biology, Physics, Integrated Science, Mathematics and Computer Science.  
So anyone interested in contributing to theses specific disciplines 
are also encouraged to contact Kris.



