Collaborative Research: CI-TEAM Demo: Harnessing Cyberinfrastructure for K-12 STEM Education

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The Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center (MGHPCC) is being constructed in Holyoke, an old mill town on the Connecticut River that enjoyed a thriving industrial past and that has experienced a difficult recent past due to the decline of manufacturing. Attracted by Holyoke's abundant and low-cost hydroelectric power, a consortium of five major universities - Boston University, Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Northeastern University and University of Massachusetts, in partnership with EMC, Cisco and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts - are constructing the MGHPCC, a $168M state-of-the-art high performance computing center. The MGHPCC Consortium and the State are strongly committed to having the center anchor an "Innovation District" that will revitalize the economy of Holyoke and create educational opportunities for the community. At the same time, UMass and the City formed a Springfield Initiative to address education and economic issues. Using the opportunity to leverage these events and partnerships, UMass Amherst and MIT execute this demonstration project to harness the cloud computing capabilities of the new center in service of K-12 STEM education in the Holyoke/Springfield area - providing a model for the state, region and the nation. This effort is developing an easy-to-use student interface allows students to easily access the MGHPCC cloud in STEM curricula. MIT developed the Virtual Interactive Textbook (VIT) - a new educational tool that provides support for students running computational experiments in order to study natural phenomena such as weather and climate change. VITs allow students to set up simulation experiment parameters on small scale devices that can then be run "in the cloud", returning the results for the students to assess and incorporate into broader project assignments. Several groups at UMass Amherst have collaborated on the development of a technology called the Electronic Integrated Book (EIB), which evolved from a successful online homework system. A major goal of this project is to combine the power of the VIT, which is an interactive, experimental paradigm providing access to the computational power of the cloud, with the assessment-driven paradigm of the EIB, which engages students as they read the text in the incremental practice of new concepts. Within the EIB framework they invoke VIT-style experiments, and have the EIB capture and store the results of these activities for the teacher to examine. Team members have critical expertise in cognition and learning with technology in science education settings, in the development of digital learning environments, and in integrating technology, language and literacy practices of culturally and linguistically diverse urban adolescents (particularly African Americans). Close ties to the Holyoke/Springfield schools will enhance the effort to refine existing STEM curricular support materials being developed by MIT atmospheric scientists that will use the new technology platforms. As a team, we will deploy and evaluate this application in classrooms, assess learning outcomes and evaluate the overall project. In year 2 we will host workshops for teachers throughout the region to disseminate the results and recruit new users. Intellectual Merit. HPC data centers are capable of sophisticated scientific simulations, but these are not easily accessible to K-12 students and teachers. Exploiting cloud computing embedded in an assessment platform represents a new approach to teaching science. Many scientific phenomena are not easy to reproduce in a classroom experiment so experiments in the classroom only approximate the real world. Students can carry out computational experiments (in a pedagogically-sound context) using modeling tools that can closely approximate both real world processes and their classroom experiment counterparts. This work will result in an innovative teaching platform that moves beyond present textbooks and eBooks. Broader Impacts. The technology and educational modules can be applied in many scenarios in many areas of science. This team will focus on developing modules that can be included in regular high/middle school curricula that will help students make the connection between principles and relations in science. This should lead to increased interest in science and an increase intake in science majors in higher education. The systems can also be used in informal settings such as museums and libraries to raise public awareness of weather and climate issues. This is providing an opportunity to bring the Holyoke (77% Latino/a) and Springfield (22% African-American and 31% Hispanic) K12 student population into the computing and STEM education pipeline.