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:
- 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.
- 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."
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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