Open Efforts for Computational Materials Research & Education: A NSDL MatDL & TMS Pilot working together with the Materials community

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This project is expanding the activities of the existing NSDL MatDL Pathway through collaboration with the Minerals, Metals, and Materials Society (TMS), a major international professional materials society, to lay the foundation for sustainable free access to authoritative computational materials research and education resources in the materials community. By coordinating complementary services, MatDL and TMS are supporting the extension and deployment of open source computational materials software in support of materials researchers and educators. In particular two open source computational materials research code projects, FiPy and OpenThermo, are being transformed for incorporation into enhanced educational modules suitable for use with undergraduates. Initial testing and evaluation is taking place in undergraduate courses at Purdue, RPI, and Texas A&M. Dissemination of these exemplary modules is taking place at special participant Roundtables of the February 2009 TMS Annual Meeting, October 2009 Materials Science and Technology Meeting, and the February 2010 TMS Annual Meeting. The intellectual merit of this project lies in its promotion of open source research codes and the transformation of these codes into current, compelling learning resources for undergraduates. Providing undergraduate students and faculty with realistic computational materials tools enables the students to develop the necessary skills in computational materials and helps faculty to incorporate computational methods more fully into their coursework. The project's broader impact falls first on the principal target audience of materials undergraduate faculty and students. But these computational materials education modules are also broadly applicable across the STEM learning community. Thus offering the undergraduate community convenient access to relevant, shared learning resources based on research promises to have a positive impact on both teaching and learning within materials science and cognate disciplines.