From Education

Request for SC Island

This is the space to develop the request to the SciLands Council for us to have a new island added to SciLands, http://www.scilands.org/bylaws/

The Request

The Education program of the SC (SuperComputing) organization (http://sc08.sc-education.org/) requests its new island be added to SciLands. We seek to use the island to promote:

• computational modeling
• problem solving
• computational science
• high performance computing
• parallel and distributed programming
• grid computing

We are in the middle of a three year pathways effort to extend the above capabilities to more discipline areas than just the sciences and to a broader range of communities. We have extended our focus from a week long focus during the November SC Conference to a year long program striving to effect change in the undergraduate curriculum.

The primary use of our land is three-fold:

Attraction

The metaverse can be used to provide interactive scientific models that will primarily educate, though the users will think they are being entertained. We have the existing Interactivate (http://www.shodor.org/interactivate/) we can deploy via a science pavilion kiosks. We plan a number of other activities employing models running remotely on large computational clusters allowing us to create immersive real-time experiences.

Mentoring

A major focus of our efforts is through week-long workshops on a variety of topics. The most we can do is to whet a scientific appetite for curricular change during the workshop. Since we are geographically dispersed, it is very difficult to provide the looking-over-you-shoulder kind of mentoring to help troubleshooting and encouragement in the use of tools and applications. The metaverse will provides us a way for 1-1 mentoring.

Meetings

Since will have met face to face, the metaverse provides a convenient way to re-gather the attendees a year later to discuss progress and hold sessions similar to those delivered in person. Long term, we wish to provision a virtual space with the same infrastructure and capabilities we have in the physical world. We also plan to provide these facilities to educators so they can conduct distance Ed classes.

Our planned use of this new land is consistent with the goals of SciLands.