• Teachers
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• Students

The Texas Advanced Computing Center has a strong commitment to, and a huge stake in, K-12 education. Most of the future engineers, scientists, architects, medical doctors, and computing experts are somewhere in grades K-12 -- in your classroom -- right now.

TACC Tour: Schedule a tour of our facilities. We can help you reinforce or elaborate on critical Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills in mathematics, science, computer science, and technology applications.

Core messages for students
TEKS Correlation
Instructional goals
Instructional activities

To understand the core messages of the tour for students, please read:

• What is Computational Science (CSERD and Shodor Foundation)
• Cyberinfrastructure Vision for 21st Century Discovery (National Science Foundation, Cyberinfrastructure Council) http://www.nsf.gov/publications/pub_summ.jsp?ods_key=nsf0728
  
• Industrial Partnerships through the NSF’s Supercomputing Resources http://www.compete.org/hpc/ip_nsf.asp

TeraGrid Conference, Student Problem-Solving Contest: At the June 2007 TeraGrid Conference in Madison, Wisconsin, high school students can enter three different kinds of competitions. http://www.union.wisc.edu/teragrid07/contests.html

1. What is advanced computing or high performance computing? The Madagascar penguins present a short video, High Performance Computing Enhances Everyday Life http://www.compete.org/store/products.asp?cat=3. You can preview the video via QuickTime player.
   
2. Computational science and computer science – aren’t they the same? No. There huge differences. The rapidly growing capability of computers and how scientists are using them has transformed science itself. The green triangular diagram that describes the nature of a scientific model deserves a few minutes of deep thought. http://www.shodor.org/refdesk/Help/whatiscs
   
3. Where can I find cool tools, and then what do I do with them? Computational Science Education Reference Desk (CSERD): a treasure trove that “aims to help students learn about computational science and to help teachers incorporate it into the classroom.” http://www.shodor.org/refdesk
   
4. How can I get professional development related to advanced computing? International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis: The HPC community simply calls this “SC” or “supercomputing,” followed by the year. Education program: http://www.sc-education.org
   
5. Are there other HPC sites? Yes! The TeraGrid http://www.teragrid.org is a collaboration of nine HPC sites, including TACC.
   
6. Can I and my students really use advanced computing in our classroom? Try out some of the tools at CSERD. http://www.shodor.org/refdesk/ Experiment with science gateways listed on TeraGrid’s Science Gateways page. http://www.teragrid.org/programs/sci_gateways/
   
7. What is cyberinfrastructure?
   
8. What are cyberinfrastructure’s impacts for STEM and education? The National Science Foundation has asked the same question. The NSF Office of Cyberinfrastructure provides a list of reports that provides some answers. http://www.nsf.gov/od/oci/reports.jsp
   

Please contact me with questions.

Brad Armosky
Education & Outreach Coordinator
Texas Advanced Computing Center
The University of Texas at Austin
barmosky@tacc.utexas.edu
512-232-9277