SCD educational activities

1997 Colorado Computational Science Fair

For the past four years, NCAR's Scientific Computing Division has co-hosted the Colorado Computational Science Fair (CCSF) in conjunction with Colorado State University to encourage high school students to learn more about computational science. The CCSF is intended to serve as a supercomputing/information technology competition for high school students throughout the state of Colorado. In FY97 the CCSF was held on Saturday, May 10, 1997 at NCAR. Seventy students from the state of Colorado entered 40 projects into the competition. Internet connections were provided for 26 projects. Group and individual projects were submitted in the areas of Computational Science and Information Technology.

Two computational science projects were sent to the national Adventures in Supercomputing Expo (held on June 23-24, 1997 in Washington, DC); these took first place in the advanced math category and third place in the intermediate math category. A list of the 1997 CCSF winners is published on the web.

For FY97 SCD completed its automation of the administrative aspects of the CCSF by using web technology. Online registration forms were provided for the students to submit an electronic "Intent to Submit" form. Students could edit this form and change information on the project, including adding or deleting student names, revising the abstract and updating the URL to the submitted electronic paper. Changes were accepted until one week before the fair, when scripts were run to import data into templates for the program, Certificates of Participation, signs identifying each project and badges for all participants.

The judging process was also put online so that fair judges could read judging guidelines and access online student papers prior to the fair. After judging the projects, judges entered comments and ratings for each project in additional online forms. Award Certificates were then generated, and judges' comments for each project were extracted by additional scripts and printed in time for handout at the Awards Ceremony. At the state coordinators' meeting in Boulder on September 19, 1997, SCD shared these scripts with other states who put on similar fairs.

Computing grants to classrooms

SCD continues to provide access to its supercomputers for undergraduate and graduate university classes. These computing resources are provided for classes engaged in modeling and simulations requiring high-performance computers, and for classes studying new architectures, such as Cray's T3D. A few high school students have also been granted access for Colorado Computational Science Fair projects. In FY 97, SCD's computing resources were used by eight classes in a variety of disciplines. Fifty-three students used SCD's supercomputing resources, including the Cray Y-MP8, Cray J90, and the T3D, accumulating over 30 CPU hours of charges.

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