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Colorado Computational Science Fair
For the past six 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 FY1999 the CCSF was held at NCAR on Saturday, May 8, 1998.Students from Colorado and Wyoming entered 53 projects into the competition. Internet connections were provided for approximately 40 projects. The 112 participating students represented ten high schools and one home-school student.
SCD's website provides a list of the 1999 CCSF winners.
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. A few high school students have also been granted access for Colorado Computational Science Fair projects.In FY1999, 41 students in 9 classes used SCD's supercomputing resources, accumulating over 200 CPU hours on NCAR's Cray J90s.
SC98 Education Program
Ginger Caldwell, SCD, chaired the SC98 Education Program held November 7-13, 1998 in Orlando. SC98 was sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society and by ACM SIGARCH. The focus of the SC98 Education Program was to provide an intensive experience with the tools and methods of computational science and networking presented in the context of classroom reality. The program included a special four-day session for 150 teachers, selected nationally, who attended in Orlando. An additional 100 educators located in Illinois, Iowa, and North Carolina attended remotely for three days using videoconferencing.The Education Program tested the usabilty of video over IP using NSF's experimental vBNS network interconnected with various state networks. A number of SCD staff provided support for this program in addition to staff from Colorado State University, East Carolina University, University of Alabama at Huntsville, Alabama Supercomputer Center, National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), Krell Institute, Iowa Public Television, Iowa State University, Iowa's Northern Trails Area Education Agency, Public Schools of North Carolina, MCNC in North Carolina, and the Maryland Virtual High School of Science and Mathematics. This experimental program was funded by NSF's Teacher Enhancement Program and by NASA. More information is available at the SC98 site: http://www.supercomp.org/sc98/education/
Increasing girls' interest in math and science
The NCAR Scientific Computing Division hosted a half-day visit of 30 eighth and ninth grade girls on February 22, 1999. The visit was organized jointly by SCD and Wheat Ridge High School in Denver, Colorado. It evolved out of a discussion about the low enrollment of high school girls in Wheat Ridge's computer science classes. The goal of the visit was to encourage these girls to prepare themselves for careers in math and science starting in high school.Seven NCAR/UCAR women representing different areas of computing and science spoke at a roundtable discussion with two groups of 15 girls each. The visit also included a tour of the Mesa Lab's exhibits and SCD's high performance computers. The visit was a success and led to higher enrollment of girls in Wheat Ridge's strong computational science program. The girls reported that they heard the message about the need to take as much math as possible so that these careers are available to them.