Shodor Education Foundation

The Shodor Education Foundation is a non-profit organization dedicated to providing resources for computational science education founded in 1994 and located in Durham, North Carolina. Shodor uses a combination of web resources and outreach to serve students and educators in the United States. Shodor develops and maintains research portals, a variety of online lesson plans, and applets as online tools for students and educators. Outreach is done through serving students and educators directly through workshops and other hands-on experiences.
The organization’s opportunities for student involvement are numerous. For students from elementary school through undergraduate levels of education, Shodor offers workshops, apprenticeships, internships and off-site programs that explore new approaches to math and science education through computational science. In addition to student programs, Shodor offers workshops that help faculty and teachers incorporate computational science into their own curricula or programs. Community outreach is another pillar of Shodor’s involvement in the community. Through numerous projects and grants, Shodor works to offer afterschool workshops to underrepresented student groups throughout the Research Triangle.
Shodor’s online resources have been the recipient of numerous awards, including a Webby Award.
Main Projects
Interactivate
Interactivate is a set of free, online course-ware for exploration in science and mathematics. The goals of Interactivate are the creation, collection, evaluation, and dissemination of interactive course-ware for exploration in science and mathematics. The site provides teachers and students with interactive activities that serve to facilitate exploration of a specific math or science concept. The digital activities allow users to connect and engage in dynamic representations, visualizations, and simulations of mathematical concepts. The Interactivate website also offers activities, discussions, lesson plans, and worksheets to students and instructors in order to increase engagement with a particular math or science concept.
Users can search and browse activities, lessons, and discussions. Activities also include comprehensive help files, content-based worksheets, and guides for both students and teachers. The lesson plans provided in Interactivate give users a general overview of how related activities and discussions might be incorporated to better teach and learn specific math concepts. The discussions provided in Interactivate are sample dialogues, provided to introduce students and instructors to concepts, vocabulary, and to help in developing important formulas and structures.
JOCSE
The Journal of Computational Science Education (JOCSE) is an online peer-reviewed publication that promotes the use of computation in education through disseminating unique uses of computation in the classroom, as well as findings in computational science education. JOCSE utilizes internet technology and a web-based format to allows for enhanced interactivity in its publications. JOCSE accepts submissions from professionals, faculty, and students.
JOCSE is an expansion of Shodor’s existing Computational Science Education Reference Desk (CSERD), a pathway project of the National Science Digital Library funded by the National Science Foundation. Materials accepted by JOCSE are hosted on the JOCSE website, and are catalogued by CSERD for inclusion in the NSDL.
The first issue of the journal has been published as of December 2010. The journal’s editor-in-chief is Stephen I. Gordon of the Ohio Supercomputer Center.
HPCU
The High Performance Computing University (HPCU) is a virtual resource designed to provide an outlet for students and educators to promote education about high performance computing and associated workplace development.
For students, HPCU provides a portal to resources related to high performance computing, including information for students about careers, competitions, financial support, internships, and fellowships.
For educators, HPCU provides information on funding, awards, and curriculum development available through workshop offerings and partner websites. HPCU is also developing competency standards for involvement in high performance computing endeavors.
The HPCU has external support through TeraGrid and its constituent national laboratories such as Oak Ridge and Lawrence Berkeley and colleges such as Purdue University and University of Chicago.
SUCCEED workshops are offered in all four of the STEM fields: science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, and cover a wide range of topics, from computational simulations to basic web design and graphics skills.
The SUCCEED Apprenticeship Program was designed for current high school students, and focuses on computational science, interpersonal communication skills, and professional behavior.
Curriculum materials for both programs are offered for educators as part of Project SUCCEED. Concepts, learning standards, prerequisite knowledge required, materials lists, and full outlines are included for each workshop and apprenticeship lesson.
Computing MATTERS
Computing MATTERS is Shodor’s program to extend outreach beyond the students in the immediate Research Triangle area. The program is intended to scale Shodor’s resources to first reach students throughout the state of North Carolina, then subsequently the rest of the country. Computing MATTERS partners with local organizations, schools, and universities to build a self-sustaining infrastructure that can implement and maintain student programs that resemble what Shodor has done through Project SUCCEED and other outreach efforts. The program has two main pillars: student programs and professional development.
Student programs under Computing MATTERS focus a pathway model, which helps students grow from excitement, to experience, and then to expertise in computational techniques. Students may enter the pathway at any age or grade level, from elementary school through college. Students are supposed to move fluidly from after-school and workshop participation to apprenticeships and internships. Along the way, the students serve as mentors for younger peers.
Computing MATTERS professional development targets educators and seeks to build higher proficiencies in the application of computing technology through the provision of content tools and workshops. Teachers learn how to best use online content such as Interactivate, in order to more effectively use technology for learning.
CSERD
The Computational Science Education Reference Desk (CSERD) is pathway project of the National Science Digital Library and funded by the National Science Foundation. CSERD aims to help students learn about computational science and to help faculty and teachers incorporate it into the classroom. CSERD attempts to:
* Collect a catalog of quality online resources.
* Provide a forum for verification, validation, and accredition of cataloged resources by both users and expert reviewers.
* Create original computational science resources for use in education.
Undergraduate Petascale Education Program
The National Center for Supercomputing Applications Blue Waters project, in collaboration with the National Computational Science Institute (NCSI) and national HPC programs, has launched initiative to prepare current and future generations of students with the computational thinking skills, knowledge and commitment to advance scientific computing through the use of high performance computing resources and environments. Support for the Undergraduate Petascale Education Program (UPEP) is provided by this Blue Waters project. The goal of UPEP is to support undergraduate internship experiences involving the application of high-performance computing to problems in the sciences, engineering, or mathematics.
UPEP also provides professional development workshops for undergraduate faculty, offered via NCSI.
Impact
Shodor’s impact has spanned over 2,000 students and faculty since detailed records began to be taken in 2001. The current count of workshops is ever increasing and has reached over 220 as of Spring 2011.
While it frequently reaches area students in North Carolina, Shodor has a run a wide range of workshops across over half of the United States as well as Costa Rica, Turkey, Spain, and recently Australia.
With the vast majority of its resources hosted on the internet, Shodor has continued to command a large visitor base.
Funding
NSF
The National Science Foundation is a US government agency with the expressed purpose of “supporting education and research across the fields of science, mathematics, and technology.” The NSF has an approximate budget of $6.9 billion and funds around 20% of federally funded research done in American higher education.
The NSF’s most recent grant (as of April 2011) awarded to Shodor involves expanding their Computing MATTERS program across the state of North Carolina and is worth $875,000. The grant is being administered over three years under the NSF's Office of CyberInfrastructure.
Also, Shodor’s Project SUCCEED is funded by the NSF’s Information Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers (ITEST) program.
The Burroughs Wellcome Fund
The Burroughs Wellcome Fund is a private foundation that works to support biomedical science through research and education. The fund’s website has two goals: “to help scientists early in their careers develop as independent investigators” and “to advance fields in the basic biomedical sciences that are undervalued or in need of particular encouragement.”
Shodor was recently awarded $18,000 over the next three years for teacher training and the development of computational science instructional materials.
Department of Education
The Department of Education is a Cabinet-level agency of the US Federal Government that administers federal funding for projects involving education. Shodor is currently funded through the Department of Education under the Fund for the Improvement of Education.
Other Funding
Shodor announced in 2010 that it had received $200,000 as part of an economic development bill for the Research Triangle area from Congress to expand workshop quality and offerings.
Shodor has also received funding from the University of Chicago to continue their partnership with the High Performance Computing University and TeraGrid to create more workshops on high performance computing topics.

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