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Volume 5, Number 1 MCSR-Led Team Mississippi Participates in SC05 Education Outreach Program A team of 9 Mississippi teachers, professors, and students are participating in the Supercomputing 05 Conference Education Outreach Program this year. The team of 5 secondary education teachers, 2 university professors, 1 university instructor, and 1 undergraduate student applied for the program in May 05. MCSR staffers had noticed the solicitation for participants on the SC05 website literally days before the window for applications was to close. With the help of the Mississippi Department of Education's Office of Technology, MCSR was able to email applications to all of the district technology coordinators in all of Mississippi's public school districts. We received several completed applications that week, and hastily put together a team application, highlighting the credentials of each team member. Notification of the team's acceptance into the program came in the fall, and the team members traveled in November to the SC05 conference, where, for four days, they were exposed to a variety of high performance computing topics. The focus of the training was to get these educators thinking about how they might inject visualization and computational science into varied disciplines of the curriculum back in their home schools and districts. In addition to classroom tutorials, small inter-geographical teams participated in planning meetings concerning the best ways to begin to employ some of the tools and techniques presented. The program culminated with group presentations on what they had learned and how they could share this information back at home.Participants were also treated to a tour of Microsoft's campus in Redmond Washington, including a trip to the heavily discounted Microsoft Company Store; free admission to the SC05 technical program; free admission to the huge exhibit area; free admission to Bill Gates' keynote address; and a free Sheryl Crow concert at the Space Needle. All Education Program participants received some software titles to take home (e.g., Matlab & Simulink), and each of the K-12 teachers, including 5 Mississippians, got a free refurbished laptop to take back and use at their home school. The conference picked up most of the tab for the trip, including airfare reimbursement (up to $400) and direct billing of hotel charges. All participants were given online assignments to complete over the next few months. The year will culminate with a trip to Purdue for one week this summer, during which participants will unveil their online educational modules, which will then be made available for other educators to reuse in the classroom. If you would be interested in applying to participate in the Education Outreach Programs in SC06 (Tampa) or SC07 (location to be determined), please email assist@mcsr.olemiss.edu, give us your name and your position at your school or university, as well as the name of the institution, and briefly describe what you would hope to learn from the experience, as well as what qualifications you have (e.g. some previous experience employing educational technology or training other educators), and what vision you may have for improving your school's ability to teaching about, or using, computational science. The SC05 Team Mississippi Participants are:
J. Crumpton, Starkville Academy |
