Category: Education

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Argonne Leadership Computing Facility Education

Argonne coding campers, class of 2015

codingcampIn July, I participated in Argonne’s first summer coding camp, a computer science education opportunity attended by 42 local high school students and organized in partnership with the DuPage County chapter of the Afro-Academic, Cultural, Technological and Scientific Olympics (ACT-SO).

A small team of Argonne computer scientists designed and taught the four-day programming curriculum, which could serve as a future model for teacher training and classroom implementation. It’s the start of good things to come in this important outreach area.

Read the article here.

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Education

Secrets of the Universe — Coming to an IMAX screen near you in 2016

I’m thrilled to be part of a new NSF-funded IMAX and digital 3D documentary film project that will introduce audiences to the major scientific instruments being used to explore the origins of the universe. Chief among these are the Large Hadron Collider at CERN and a new generation of supercomputers.
My specific contribution is advisory and relates to the role of supercomputing in this scientific enterprise. Systems like Mira accelerate discoveries in the cosmology arena through large-scale scientific simulation and visualization of enormously complex physical phenomena. (Both simulation and visualization will be featured prominently in the film.) Supercomputers were recently used to generate the largest cosmology simulation ever, which will help the scientific community to test theories against observational data, such as the next-generation of sky surveys preparing to go online.
Filming will take place during 2013 and 2014 and will result in a 2D/3D giant screen film, a dome planetarium film, museum exhibits and other educational materials. It’s a great team of investigators that include media communications guru Mark Kresser, UC Davis physics professor Manuel Calderon de la Barca, Franklin Institute’s Dale McCreedy, and IMAX film director Stephen Low.
A particularly interesting aspect of this outreach project is that it also supports a study of middle school girls’ interest and engagement in the topic. (Middle school girls’ interest in science and math tends to plummet around this time due to several social factors.) Films like these are high-quality outreach projects that present complex scientific research to the public in an accessible and entertaining way. It’s also an excellent opportunity to develop insights into how to develop STEM content for an especially vulnerable group of learners.

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Education

The beginning of a change

After posting a few months back on the exciting STEAM work at RISD, and the push to integrate art into STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) curricula, I was eager to attend the “The Art of Science Learning” talk at Argonne this week, where I learned about a National Science Foundation program with similar goals.
The Art of Science Learning is a national initiative that uses the arts to spark creativity in science education. The goal of the project’s development activities is to experiment with a variety of “innovation incubator” models in cities around the country: one in San Diego (hosted by Balboa Park Cultural Partnership), one in Chicago (hosted by the Museum of Science and Industry), and one in Worcester, Mass (hosted by the EcoTarium). These incubators generate collaborations of different professionals and the public around STEM education and other STEM-related topics of local interest that can be explored with the help of creative learning methodologies.
Chicago incubator director Tim Morrison spoke about this initiative, and the yearlong effort starting this January to address the STEM challenges of urban nutrition.
Projects like these are aimed at exploring a framework to ultimately change the way children are educated in the U.S. — one that emphasizes creativity and innovation as a means to build a strong economy. I, for one, am extremely encouraged to see this movement gathering steam. Pun intended.

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Argonne Leadership Computing Facility Education

Extreme-Scale Computing Training Course: Class of 2013!

Today I met with the first class of young scientists and researchers to participate in the Argonne Training Program on Extreme-Scale Computing. The trainees are now into week two of lectures and hands-on sessions aimed at teaching them how to program massively parallel supercomputers. I chaired the afternoon session on data visualization and analysis, complete with a set up success stories, taught by colleagues from ALCF, the University of Oregon/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Kitware, Inc.
Training course organizers tell me this is an enthusiastic and motivated group; many of the participants remain long after the lectures end to engage the speakers on topics ranging from the latest performance tools to debugging to data analysis. Last week the group got special access to Argonne’s leadership computing resources, including Mira. This week they got a similar opportunity to experiment with application runs on Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s leadership system, Titan.
By funding this training course, the DOE is helping expand the user community of today’s high-end systems, but more importantly they are helping prepare a new generation of computer and computational scientists to keep our national priorities on track.

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Education Musings

From Lego bricks to C++: promoting computational thinking skills in U.S. schools

TEALS (Technology Education And Literacy in Schools) is a nonprofit tech-literacy teaching program that grew out of Microsoft engineer Kevin Wang’s desire to teach computer science in his spare time. Microsoft liked it, funded it, and made Wang its chief promoter. That was in 2009. For the 2013-2014 academic year, Wang just placed 250 volunteers in 65 schools in 12 states.
The TEALS program recruits, mentors, and places high tech professionals into high school classrooms to teach computer science courses. These volunteers team teach with in-service teachers, who eventually assume full responsibility for the coursework. The goal is to give schools and school districts a computer science curriculum to self manage and grow into a sustainable computer science program.
The tech industry has been clamoring for years about the dearth of programming talent in the United States. A program like TEALS, which attempts to fill a gap where there is insufficient government investment and interest in basic computer science education, is a good start. TEALS provides top tech talent to school districts unable to provide computer science curriculum, but the program’s reach would have to scale up drastically in coming years if the industry hopes to see any impact in U.S. competitiveness in this area.
If an interest in computer science is to take seed in a student, basic computational concepts must be introduced much sooner than high school. Computational thinking is integrative. Learning to program is like learning to spell — it’s a skill that makes many other areas of knowledge accessible.
It’s time to develop pedagogical models to enable all U.S. students to graduate high school with a functional understanding of computer science. I would advocate for building up problem solving skills in lower grades, mastering basic programming exercises in middle school, and full immersion in computing languages by high school. The sooner we can get parents, teachers, and administrators to see the value of providing the foundation our kids need to get excited about computer science, the sooner we’ll start effecting real change in our ability to compete.

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Education Musings

Critical thinking skills: what designers have and U.S. industry needs

From the time I was an undergraduate physics major, I’ve also been interested in the creative activities intrinsic to art and design fields. Critique, conceptualization, and iteration are all useful practices for developing new ways of seeing reality. Good artists and designers understand the value of deconstructing a subject, evaluating its components, and using that information to guide future directions. These “critical thinking” skills are increasingly in demand in all sectors.
The STEM-to-STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math + Art = STEAM) movement being championed by RISD’s John Maeda aims to enhance U.S. economic competitiveness by cultivating the creative and critical thinking skills that innovative companies are seeking. National Laboratories are also leaders in innovation, but there is a notable absence of artistic and design collaboration in the R&D process.
This effort could lead to very exciting transformations in U.S. industry and research. One question I’ve been considering lately is how to incorporate STEM-to-STEAM beyond the K-12 setting to the scientific workplace.