Foster the incorporation of high performance research tools for scientific investigation into the undergraduate curriculum to better prepare learners for post-Baccalaureate activities where

• collaborative, interdisciplinary teams,
• sophisticated computer tools, and
• effective communication among the team members and with others

are used in research and problem solving.

Support and assess the curriculum changes in CSU, the largest and most diverse undergraduate system in US, and on the national scale.

• Dr. Kris Stewart, Director, Assoc. Prof. of Math and Computer Science, SDSU
• Dr. Ilya Zaslavsky, GIS Staff Scientist (also Assist. Prof. on leave from WMU)
• Ms. Dolores Candelario, Assistant to the Director
• just hired student assistants

 

• SUN Ultra, 2 X-terms, 4 NT Workstations, Macintosh, JavaStation, projection system
• Facility "under the Dome" (Library basement), open house was on 10/10/97 (cubicles plus conference room)

EC/CSE

numerous publications, in CSU, SDSU, and NPACI periodicals

Activities:

• disseminating information about HPC resources, including tools and computer time
• presentations to SDSU departments and CSU campuses (some travel funds are available) on HPC and available resources and opportunities
• supporting HPC-related projects of CSU and SDSU faculty
• in-house testing of HPC tools in undergraduate curriculum
• individual collaboration with faculty
• preparing workshops on computational tools for the faculty
• arranging for student assistance in HPC-related projects

Evaluation

• EC/CSE has been contacted by NISE for 2nd-year evaluation

Examples of collaborations already formed by EC/CSE

• vBNS proposal participatation by SDSU within the CSU (currently under negotiation)
• Collaboration  with the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH), NPACI partner in Virginia
• NSF proposal by Doug Deutschman (SDSU Biology), on chaparral ecosystem simulation modeling and visualization with the SORTIE-like model (with interfaces tuned to student exploration, in particular) - involves EC/CSE (January 1998)
• Industrial partnership with Mathworks (MATLAB, which now has MapTools) (November 1997)
• National Endowment for the Humanities proposal with Dr. Bob Hoffman (SDSU Ed Tech) on using VRML to simulate the California mission so that 4th grade students can become docents of the mission and conduct virtual tours. (October 1997)
• EC/CSE was client in SDSU's ET 644 Instructional Design course (Roxanna Springer & Lance Larson) (Fall 1997)
• NSF CAREER proposal by Janet Bowers (SDSU Math & Computer Science) on developmental research in technology-enhanced classrooms to support the devlopment of individual and collective conceptions of algebra and geometry (July 1997)
• Collaboratory use of GIS over the Internet in instruction (using tools developed at NPAC, Syracuse, and NCSA), and the experiment in distance teaching of GIS and spatial analysis over the Web (EC/CSE, SDSU  to Geography, WMU, on-going)
 

    Teaching:

• Kris is teaching two CS courses in Spring: CS205 "Computational Programming and Visualization", and CS575 "Supercomputing". Active learning and group learning strategies are implemented in both classes. Student progress and the experiments outcome are assessed with a series of questionnaire surveys and interviews
• Ilya is teaching two computationally-intensive geography courses, on GIS (Geog569) and Geographic Data Handling (Geog567) at Western Michigan University from the Ed.Center, using web-based collaborative environments (NetMeeting, experimenting with Tango)

• Inventory  of NPACI and NCSA resources, recent projects, and opportunities, organized by disciplines, and tailored to particular curriculum needs (available from our Web site, undr construction)
• Organization of available VRML scenes, and Java applets by disciplines (under construction)
• Testing various Web collaboratory tools for synchronous distance learning (Tango and SciVis from NPAC, Habanero from NCSA, NetMeeting from Microsoft) in the process of real distance teaching on the undergraduate level (from SDSU to WMU, and potentially to some CSU sites).
• Exploration of group and problem-based learning in computationa programming and HPC instruction, including the analysis of bridging environments in pre-supercomputing curriculum

Dr. Kris Stewart (stewart@sdsu.edu), Director
Dr. Ilya Zaslavsky (zaslavsk@rohan.sdsu.edu), GIS Staff Scientist
Education Center on Computational Science & Engineering
San Diego State University
Love Library Addition, Rm 73
www.edcenter.sdsu.edu