The EdCenter Faculty Fellows Spring 2001 Project Presentations

Attendees at the Spring 2001 EdCenter Faculty Fellows Final Project Presentation include (from left): Fellow Kathy Thorbjarnarson, EdCenter student programmers Chris Harper and Hiroko Baba, Cassie Ferguson-SDSC staffperson, Fellow Fred Kohlkorst, Kirsten Barber-EdCenter Staffperson, Cheryl Brown-SDSC External Relations, Chair of Geography-Ed Aguado, Kris Stewart-EdCenter Director, and Fellow Christina Tague).

On May 22, 2001, The Education Center on Computational Science and Engineering hosted its most recent faculty fellows as well as their college dean's and department chairs for an end-of-semester final project presentation.

EdCenter fellow Christina Tague demonstrated the OpenDX visualization "front-end" to her ecological hydrology model RHESSYS using Java Swing.

Christina Tague, demonstrated a Java interface to her ecological hydrology research model, RHESSYS, that will help students gain understanding of the interaction of hydrologic and ecological concepts such as soil moisture and evapotransporation.

Kathy Thorbjarnarson, professor of geological sciences, created a variety of online tutorials including "virtual field trips" to illustrate her geology courses. She had developed an internet-based syllabus for her students and created interactive animations to demonstrate concepts such as the movement of pollution through water.

Fred Kolkhorst, associate professor of the exercise and nutritional sciences department worked with an online survey assessment tool as well as other data analysis tools included in the EdCenter-developed Sociology Workbench to evaluate student attitudes towards inquiry-based learning. "It was a real turnabout in how we do labs," he said.

Fred Kolkhorst presents the results of his efforts to evaluate student attitudes towards an inquiry-based exercise physiology laboratory. (Attendees, from left: Kirsten Barber, Cheryl Brown, Chair of Geography-Ed Aguado, College of Arts & Letters, Kris Stewart, Dean Tom Scott - Sciences, and EdCenter Fellows Fred Kohlkorst, Tom Impelluso, and Kathy Thorbjarnarson).

Finally, Thomas Impelluso, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, described one of the projects he was working on with his students, building a virtual physics machining simulator that would test the "real world" physics of amusement park rides, and running the parallelized simulation code on the Cray T3E at SDSC.

In addition to the four fellows who made presentations, Faculty Fellow Kathleen McGuire, associate professor of biology, has been working on integrating the Biology Workbench and other bioinformatics tools into both biology and bioinfomatics courses.