November 1993

Boston


This is a brief description of what happened at the Boston meeting. In point of fact, it will be *very* brief as I am desperately trying to get ready for my trip to Supercomputing '93, which will be followed by a speaking tour in Oregon and California.

All in all the Boston meeting went very well. There were only eight attendees (myself, Corones, Johnson, Zachary, Ziebarth, Diaz, White, and Martin) which allowed us to make lots of decisions concerning the project, but, of course, input from more people would have been welcome.

The most important thing to come out of the Boston meeting, for all practical purposes, is that this project finally has a formal name, we decided to call it

Undergraduate Computational Engineering and Science

or UCES, which is pronounced "uses". I have arranged to have the workstation which services the project renamed to uces.ameslab.gov, and from now on you can reach me at

tlm@uces.ameslab.gov

and you can also reach the project at

uces@uces.ameslab.gov

Expect this change of address to take place sometime this week.

The other big things which came out of the meeting are:

  1. We ran through the freshman/introductory course outline for several hours and managed to fill it out fairly well. I will send an updated version of the outline once I have transcribed all the notes taken at the meeting, which will be a day or two after I return from Supercomputing excursion, which means the end of this month.
  2. We developed a paradigm for how we want to present the "example" modules which will make up a good part of the materials we are going to collect. This paradigm was put into "pictorial" form, and the relevant picture was jazzed up by a graphic artist and was incorporated into our "PR sheet."
  3. We also updated the PR sheet quite nicely. 1000 copies have been made and will be distributed at Supercomputing 93. After I return I will arrange to send 50 or so physical copies to all of you so that you have something to give out describing our efforts.
  4. In order to carry out the above, could all of you please send me a complete set of contact data, i.e., name, address, emails, phones including FAX, etc. I already have this information for about half of you, but want to compile a complete database of everyone in the project. I'll e-mail the results back to all of you.
  5. Chris Johnson and Joe Zachary showed the first couple of modules for the introductory class. These looked very nice, particularly when used with Joe's X-windows "teaching tool." I will arrange to download the teaching tool and will make it available on the archive. Will also start translating their modules into Mathematica notebooks sometime the first week in December.
  6. We also have decided that in addition to anonymous FTP and a mailserver we will support Mosaic to the best of our ability.

The next meeting will almost certainly be Jan. 28th and 29th in San Diego. That will be a two full day meeting, as we expect to have representative from Maple and Mathematica come to give us a live demonstration of their packages. I will send out a formal announcement regarding the exact dates and location sometime in the first couple weeks of December.

Sorry to be so cryptic, but things are very busy here. Expect a more detailed description, including the course outline and a copy of the PR doc, in about two weeks.

Regards to all ---- Tom


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