Pre-college

From SC Education

There has been some expression of interest among the Pathways and SC Education Program community for developing ways to respond to requests for HPC and grid resources suitable for pre-college students. Tom Loughran, I2U2 Education Program Leader, attended the Feb 28 - March 1st Pathways planning event to explore ways to provided resources and training opportunities for pre-college teachers. I2U2 is a virtual organization fostering the creation of e-Labs, which are online data-driven and grid-supported research opportunities for students. Their primary target audience has been high school and middle school students, but as the suite of e-Lab options grows, undergraduate interest may be encouraged as well.

Currently, students can use e-Labs to run cosmic ray studies in four different modes of execution, including locally, on a cluster, and on the grid. Particle physics e-Labs are currently available for HS students, and earthquake/weather data from LIGO's environmental sensors for MS students. (These resources can be accessed at [1].) We can offer exposure to these NSF-sponsored resources to pre-college teachers as one way of exposing students to the power of distributed and high productivity computing.

Tom will attend the IU NW parallel computing workshop in August.

Tom also expressed interest in sending a graduate computational science student, a GK-12 Fellow, to that workshop, and deploying a Little FeAR computer in his educational outreach activities in South Bend area schools. Tom is Co-PI of the NDeRC [2] GK-12 program.