Teacher PD

This page will contain information for the Teacher PD course currently under development.

Purpose

This purpose of this PD course is to assist teachers in developing class materials which demonstrate the power and utility of scientific computing. The course content will be largely teacher-driven, with material presented on requested subjects in computing.

Possible topics

The goal of the course is to assist teachers in developing their own content. As such, the teachers themselves will determine the direction of the course. To get started, we list some possible topics below.

Computational thinking, necessary for understanding a wide range of disciplines, as well as an useful skill set in its own right.

Computational thinking skills for educators; best practices in teaching computational skills to students

Existing simulation/data analysis tools that can be used in discipline-specific classes

Basic Python programming

Methods for simulation

Methods for data analysis

Technologies for larger-scale computation
- Clusters, including in-class
- Cluster parallel computing
- GPU parallel computing

Large-scale simulation techniques

Large-scale data analysis techniques

To express desire for a particular topic, or to suggest others, please email Erik Spence (ejspence at scinet.utoronto.ca).

Lecture slides

Python Script for Interactive Ball on Vibrating Plate

Requires pyprocessing and pyglet (pip install pyglet; pip install pyprocessing)

Lecture 6

Modified BCCD image used in lecture 6

Big Data Challenge

The Canadian Young Scientist Journal, SciNet, and other organizations, are sponsoring a high school Big Data Challenge. Please share with your students!

Interactive tools

Educator resources

Shodor's MASTER Tools
San Diego Supercomputer Center's TeacherTECH
HPC University Resources for Computational Modeling
NASA's educator resources
Economic modelling resources
Earthquake engineering resources
Capitol University's computational science modules
Quantitative Environmental Learning Project