ADVANCED COMPUTING FOR SCIENCE EDUCATION

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The Advanced Computing for Science Education project proposes to utilize and build upon state of the art computing technology to construct a general purpose science learning environment. The environment will provide a powerful and unique integration of computing tools that is specifically targeted to the needs of students in a scientific discipline. It seeks to develop a general language and learning environment that supports student efforts to pose and answer broad classes of questions of scientific interest and to test them in a simulated environment. The proposed work is innovative in that it promotes a style of learning and scientific inquiry that is not available in current computer-based learning environments for science. This is accomplished by utilizing a programming language as a vehicle for scientific discourse, exploiting abstraction as a means of dealing with complexity, and incorporating high quality graphics and animation capabilities. It is intended to supplement a complete science curriculum with a virtual laboratory that allows experimentation which may otherwise be impossible or require prohibitive resources. In contrast to traditional systems, student participation is not limited to avenues that have been anticipated in advance by the author of the lesson. The proposed work is important because it addresses widely perceived problems of science education by motivating and encouraging students to apply their knowledge and develop their skills of scientific inquiry in exploring important and interesting topics of advanced science. This work postulates that a computer programming language is useful and powerful as a language of scientific discourse. This assertion will be tested by evaluating the effectiveness of the environment in situations of varying teacher-student computing backgrounds in an advanced course in developmental biology, freshman college course, and in a high school biology course. //