2010 Workshops

This workshop will introduce college faculty to various resources that can be used to prepare students to acquire computational thinking, modeling and quantitative analysis skills that have become essential to the practice of modern biology. Hands-on sessions with software for building and running dynamic models, and analyzing sequence and genomic data will be coupled with pedagogy and examples of integration into the biology classroom. Hands-on tutorials on first two days will focus on: agent-based and system dynamics modeling; stochastic simulation and phylogenetic analysis. A variety of tools will be introduced, from introductory to advanced. The focus will then shift to group work to develop materials for the classroom, with additional sessions based on participant interest.

This workshop will cover various ways that computers can be used to enhance and expand the educational experience of students enrolled in the undergraduate chemistry curriculum. Discussions and hands-on laboratory exercises on visualization, simulation, molecular modeling, and mathematical software will be presented.

The purpose of these workshops is to expose participants to and inspire them with new techniques, teaching materials, and applications to use computational models in the undergraduate curriculum. By bringing faculty from different disciplines together so that they can learn how to incorporate computational models into their classrooms and research projects, it will advance the use of computing in undergraduate science education. We desire to have participants from a broad range of disciplines, including computer science, mathematics, and the natural sciences.

NCSI's Parallel and Cluster Computing workshops focus on teaching faculty how to move from traditional desktop computing to modern high-performance hardware. Offerings range from end-user focused applications ready-designed for HPC to the details of creating applications designed to run on clusters, many-core machines, shared-memory machines, and graphics processing units. The material is designed for undergraduate faculty from a variety of disciplines who would like to add parallel computing to their undergraduate teaching and research. In addition, undergraduate and graduate students are encouraged to attend alongside a sponsoring faculty member. The workshop is hands-on, with exercises in both computing and curriculum development.