 Welcome to another edition of RCE. This is Brock Palin. You can find us online at RCE-cast.com There's all the old episodes there and RSS feed where you can find everything about all of us I have again here Jeff Squires one of the authors of open MPI from Cisco Systems Jeff. Thanks again for your time Sure Brock. Yeah today We're doing something on the education venue, which I think is awesome because it directly relates to our field But it's also about bringing new people to the field and bringing them up and all these kinds of things So give us a little explanation of this Yeah, so today we're gonna have a guest talk to us about something. I believe it's pronounced show door. He will Correct this for me, but it's an organization. It appears to be focused on education more So Bob want you to take a moment to introduce yourself and then give us an overview of what show door is Okay, my name is Bob Panoff I'm one of the founders and the executive director of the show door education foundation or simply called show door I used to be a physics professor and one of the things that I developed with my colleagues in math and computer science Was an interdisciplinary approach to research and teaching Which everyone calls computational science these days, but wasn't so much so 25 years ago In the course of developing what we wanted to do in the classroom and in the computational laboratory We found that the training of faculty through workshops was in a very important piece and that's something that we have Focused on and it was really the reason show door came into existence Greetings the Director of Education not reach activities for the NSF funded exceed project as well as for the staff-funded blue waters project and I spent my time at the National Center for Supercomputing applications at the University of Illinois So when you say training of faculty and in education, you're not talking about Training faculty in computational science you're talking about training faculty in the education of things. They probably already know Well, it's a little bit of both because in the United States there is only one profession in Which the individuals practicing that profession get absolutely no Training in the conduct of what they're doing and that is college professor So if someone is going to be teaching With modeling and simulation they perhaps have never seen that as a method even though they may be modeling and simulating all the day Long but to teach with models and simulations as content and method is something that's that's new to most faculty But in many cases, we've also had to teach faculty about modeling and simulation because it's not necessarily native to their own experiences especially in Biological sciences in the social sciences. We find a lot of people say they went into biology because they love Science but didn't want to have to do any math and so we often have to introduce them to the power of modeling simulation Interactive visualization and then help them bring that into the classroom as well So we're overloading some terms here. And so what I want to know is what you just described you're actually talking about encouraging teaching with the use of Some of these computational resources that the rest of us tend to use for our research and we actually focus on computation But you're talking about they're just another tool for teaching possibly anything Right, and it's not just another tool because it's also the content of what's being taught that people need to know That what we're learning in astronomy is not just by looking in telescopes that what we do with models of galaxies and colliding galaxies is much more the practice of the everyday computational Scientist then simply analyzing data. So it's an important part. What we like to kid about is the breathing mode We're interested in both computational Science education which is using Computational models and simulations and the analysis of data to teach the content of physics chemistry biology the social sciences But we also teach Computational science which is how to build the model how to construct the model how to test the model How to be sure that you know that you're not only solving the right problem, but that you're solving the problem, right? So we talk about computational Science education and also computational science Education and shoulders engage and has been for 20 years now in the practice of both Now how did you come to recognize this as a problem that needed to be solved or put differently? How did this all get started? well in the old days I was a physics professor and I was also the director of education at NCSA and There was an opportunity through discussions with the National Science Foundation that we could be running a Substantial number of workshops that the National Science Foundation would be willing to pay for unfortunately The organizations that I had worked for at the university and center level Did not necessarily want to take on a grant in which the bulk of the funding was participant costs And and the simple reason is there's no overhead It would cost more than we would be bringing in they said for us to run these workshops And so showed or really was created to have an independent nonprofit 501c3 whatever jargon you want to use Approach to doing faculty enhancement for helping faculty to be better at what they do and how they do it without necessarily Extracting a university or the supercomputing centers From their concern about the bottom line in the actual cost of the grant So showed or was really this this new idea of being an independent player So that by day most of us who ended up working at showed or would be professors at universities But on our own time we would run these workshops for other faculty Then I had a wonderful opportunity and in fall of 1994 20 years ago this fall I was diagnosed with kidney cancer and they gave me a Look at the life expectancy versus size of tumor data Which was a scatterplot that went to zero at 10 centimeters and since my tumor was 21 centimeters Of necessity They gave me an opportunity to think about what did I want to do for the next six months and the answer was Let's work on getting showed or up and running and I can always come back and be a physics professor later so you mentioned that you know the university professor is the only you know profession where you're not actually trained to teach, but you're expected to but Primary secondary education that is the case, but we definitely don't see these sorts of tools being used there to show our work in that space Secondary education. Yes, we do, but we also do it primarily through changing the experience of the undergraduate student and their professors People ultimately teach the way they were taught not the way they were taught how to teach so by Example if someone was in a Chemistry class and they never saw computational chemistry and they were only lectured to but they had a science teaching methods class in the school of education They recommended using models and simulations when that high school teacher gets into their own classroom She's probably going to be lecturing to her students because that's how she learned chemistry And so where we're seeing more of this happening is when we take these workshops That are funded by NSF through exceed or through other grants When we bring these faculty together and they change the undergraduate experience Then the students in those classes are going to either be future graduate students and perhaps future professors themselves And many of them are going to be future middle school elementary or high school teachers. So Depending upon How those things are going, you know, we can make that effect So we do have direct workshops for middle school and high school teachers We have workshops for the faculty who teach the content of math and science at the undergraduate level We have not been as successful and in some ways it it hasn't hurt us because of what I said In working with as many schools of education as we had hoped But it's really that introductory course as a freshman or sophomore when you see Biology or chemistry or physics for the first time and you see how to learn it and explore it if if Dynamic models are part of that experience of learning. It will become part of the experience in their teaching Okay, now what she just said there reflects my own experience in education I never saw a simulation or modeling and until college What do you Have middle school teachers show in terms of dynamic models and and and well more generally, you know at every level What kind of teaching style do you encourage for the content matter that is presented say at a fifth grade sixth grade seventh grade all the way up through The collegiate level right so we we sort of do the high chair to rocking chair womb to tomb approach to education So many of our materials are used by teachers to teach kids as young as third grade We're also entrusted by the blue waters project in the National Science Foundation to run the pedascale education program a Little fun thing we like to do is to have people go to Google and type in the words arithmetic quiz Or type in the two words pedascale education and in each case what you're going to run into is That showed or has been working at all of these levels to make the learning of science and the practice of science more dynamic So for instance with little kids We have models that will let them see a predator prey problem in the in the context of Wolves eating rabbits and rabbits eating grass and everybody hopping around or moving around and the dynamic agent model is something Which is producing a visual model of what's happening in the ecology at the same time There are graphs and data that are generated in the model that can be looked at in a math class There are opportunities for them to propose computational experiments and to change parameters and to vary things and to make conjectures So the idea of of making the classroom an inquiry-based approach in which the fundamentals of the scientific process really come down to expectation Conservation and reflection and what the computational world brings to the learning of science and the learning of math is the ability of Seeing the effects of one's expectations Directly observing those effects and then giving an opportunity to reflect on them So we have everything from spread of disease predator prey collision of molecules collision of galaxies Right, so here are two different n body problems Which we of course would not necessarily use that language with a third grader or seventh grader But the idea is that there are many things happening in the world That involve collisions and some of them are at the sub nuclear level and some of them are at the galactic level and we can understand both of them at different scales through Modeling and through simulation So you're talking about teaching You know using these tools Teaching a subject that's already being taught But there's been a big push in the last couple of years of things like code org and other things that are more focused on the tools That would be used to make new of these models at an earlier age Do you guys work with them or do you see them as having a different goal than what you have? well part of their goal is as I understand it and I am not Intimately working with them is that they're looking at programmers from the standpoint of using people to teach programming and A lot of what they do is they have an idea of what you can program and how you can program it What we are using is sort of what you might call middleware, which is modeling software So we don't write the code that's inside of Excel But we use Excel to build a dynamic visual interactive model We don't write the code that generates agent models But there are people who have generated those models like agent sheets in which at a very high level in a very descriptive level You can create a model from a description of the behaviors So if I wrote a sentence that said if a healthy person is next to a sick person There is a chance the healthy person Changes into a sick person. I've just written code but only if I'm using the modeling software that can interpret my sentence and make it this dynamic interactive experience at The coding level we agree that some people are going to need to know coding and the earlier They learn it the better but we find many more people will learn coding if you actually give them these Intermediate tools first so system models or agent models or numerical models That that it's the model building software that we use to great success And then those students who see that and ultimately push the limits of that software come back and say well How would I go beyond this the answer as well if you knew some programming you could do that? So rather than starting out everybody with hello world or simple things or teaching loops or teaching abstracts We want to start teaching science using computational methods and the best approach that we have found Is this realm and wealth of tools that are our modeling and model building tools rather than Assuming that it's going to be programming That being said even when we teach programming we teach programming with working models So we give students an existing Java or JavaScript or Fortran or C model That's completely built running and works and then the students learn To modify that model and to tweak it and to see if I change this what happens if I change this what happens What we don't want to do is teach keyboarding skills. I mean In my experience a lot of programming classes is learning how to type Right and what we would rather do is is learn how to explore and to conjecture and to observe and to model And certainly part of that I think we've learned to talking with many people is that this approach is more Interesting to girls young women who want to get into modeling visualization as well And it's a number of the minorities tell us we work with a lot of Hispanic and African-American students here who don't necessarily Have the background or have computers at home but they very quickly get into this dynamic and visual modeling environment and then they they get They get excited about it. There's something that they that we can see a higher retention across the board Now you mentioned a couple of technologies in there. So Java JavaScript Fortran and so on You kind of beat me to the punch on the question I was going to ask what software do you use and you have You know different levels of software that you use or different types of software and Modeling tools that you use at the different levels of education Yes, so at the and I'm not going to talk so much about grade level but Knowledge level so at the novice level and that novice could be a middle school student or their teacher It could be a graduate or a postdoc But at the novice level we have models that work that run And the student learns to run the model and learn the science by varying parameters By making observations by thinking deeply about what the output of the model gives you And I would say that for professionally in some fields That's exactly how the profession works. I know very few chemists who on a daily basis write code But they run Gaussian Now that's not necessarily true with some of the other sciences But there's a lot of science to be done by running models that have already been built running code That's already been built and what your job is is to define the problem and interpret the results So we have lots of java applets javascript applets Our website gets four million web views not just hits but web views a month where people are spreading diseases and and Propagating rabbits and they're looking in the ecology or they're studying the variation of code right not not in reality They're not spreading diseases actually right But but you know what I mean? It's it's they're getting their hands on the real subject area By seeing what happens under certain conditions. So that's been a really fun part of what we do We can provide materials to people and they can use them for learning And actually that I mean that's actually the key part of simulation the modeling To do things you can't do in the real world either because it's too small too big too dangerous or right infectious Right so so that's one part now the next thing we do is we use a set of modeling environments And I'll include excel as one of them Uh, we use for agent modeling. We use both Uh, something funded by nsf called agent sheets. We also use net logo Uh, and and the bulk of those models and also another environment that does system modeling Uh, which is called then sim the bulk of those things are we give students and their teachers Models that have been built in these environments But because we're giving them in the environment in which they were built They can not just change a parameter. They can actually modify the model They can add effects that weren't in there to begin with they can change effects They can make it much more complex And and so they learn the modeling process by taking the ancient Theorem of modeling which is that the right answer is the wrong answer plus corrections Right, so you start with a simple model. It's not really the way the world works It may not even be close, but you can make it better And so these modeling environments That allow you to look at things in in the context of iterative processes Is something that's really powerful and gets students and and showed or has Not only created a lot of these materials, but we have collected materials From the students and the faculty that we've taught and we vetted them And and make them available through what's called the computational science Education reference desk. It's part of the national science digital library We've also At the higher end at the level of pediscale. We have assisted faculty in developing Complete teaching modules on topics from atoms to galaxies In which students can access Code that runs on computers a million times faster than their own mac or pc The so-called pediscale machines And and see that science on a very large scale Right, so but the approach we're taking is Creating models that already work are ready to run and the learning Is achieved by changing parameters in those models Up to modifying the models themselves Then ultimately we promote a fairly good percentage, but not nearly Everyone because they don't need to To become becoming the programmers who build those modeling environments in the first place So I want to take a little bit of a different route here Thinking more about secondary education. Do you actually go into Schools themselves. It sounds like a lot what you described is come play with something on our website or come to some workshop which is in addition to Your normal learning Second area is a harder thing to kind of break into and get them to change their ways Have you had any success there? Yes, and we've done it as I said First and foremost by changing the undergraduate experience and having teachers go into the classroom and bring our materials with them A second is that we work in a train the trainer model where we're working with a number of state Institutions from north carolina to texas to oregon We've even gone up to alaska in which we work with the people who work with teachers and show them Better ways of using the technologies that are being brought to the classroom Our biggest success historically has been with the schools that are on american military bases overseas Starting in the late 90s Congress mandated that every child in every american school on every american military base overseas Would spend at least an hour a week on a computer and the teacher said doing what? Because they had no curriculum. They had no software and so showed or took about Starting in the late 90s and going all the way through today We have developed a set of materials called interactivate It's available from showed or at no cost. It runs on any device mobile or otherwise And it produces this set of materials and then we work with teachers to incorporate that Uh showed or has the co-teaching model where when we train the trainers We recommend that those trainers themselves work with teachers in their own classrooms and not just have sort of a remote You know impersonal workshop. So that's a big part The other part that we're doing If I can sort of change it a little bit is we do a lot of workshops with middle school and high school students ourselves Here at our office in Durham, North Carolina So we have Hundreds of kids in the summer will come through week-long workshops in which they'll learn um It's not the name of the workshop the name of the workshop is modeling your world for instance, but what they're really learning is Um computational biology and computational physics or computational chemistry But they're learning it at a topic in a way that they can see the excitement And then those kids bring what they've learned back to their classrooms And then we hear from their teachers saying hey, how can you help me do this same type of thing? We have an entire apprenticeship program teaching high school students The range of skills from modeling and simulation web design and graphics Programming including parallel programming system administration and databases And through a program that is very time intensive these high school kids put in three Full saturdays a month plus eight weeks in the summer working a 40 hour week And we are producing students who are capable of building the models that we ourselves use and produce and make available to people So at the end of the day we not only have The number one simple graphing tool on the internet. We have kids who know how to build I mean again, this could be a little homework exercise for the listener Go to google and type in the two words simple plot plo t And what you're going to see is a really really well built simple to use graphing tool That is so much easier to use at all kinds of levels than Pulling up excel if all you want to do is build a graph Right, and that was built by high school kids here in north caroline So we we we see a great success in getting kids To be building things that other people can use And success in getting other people to use those Okay, so at the secondary level and primary level most states have defined material that schools are required to cover every year Have you gone to like actually the state level at individual states and been like here's modules that map exactly to The material you're supposed to be presenting Yes, we have gone to the states and they've come to us. So for instance In all of our online materials and interactivate Every activity and every lesson plan is indexed to the common core standards and to individual state standards that haven't accepted common core At the same time the individual states who have discovered our materials Are building databases of recommended materials that support their own individual state standards So if you were to go to the texas Education associate the tea and look for their standards texas has actually aligned all of our materials to their standards Because they support what they're trying to teach If you went to a website called nylearns.org that's the new york regents They have a complete alignment of all of the shoulder materials according to the standards based Learn nc is the north carolina standards organization And they have taken all of our materials and aligned them to the individual state standards as well So we've done the alignments and if you were to go to shoulder.org and click on interactivate You could click on a button that actually says standards and you could look for individual state standards Or you could look for the common core or what are sometimes called the nctm or the national council of teachers of mathematics So it goes both ways So you've mentioned a couple times that you have some some free tools. How are how are you funded? How do you? What are your costs and how do you keep this education rolling? So our initial funding was in fact from the national science foundation to run workshops when that Workshop grant which was a very small grant at the beginning because I had been Ill at the at the actual foundational stage of showed or so showed So the nsf gave us a little bit of money to do a few workshops When those were evaluated to be highly successful they expanded it substantially and gave us not only money For running additional workshops, but for developing the content That was needed as faculty came back to us and said yes, what you showed us was nice, but here's what I need And so the national science foundation has funded probably 80 percent of showed or over the course of time either directly through grants to showed or or through several awards from various institutions From ncsa and the university of illinois primarily So that's that's a bulk of our funding. We also get funding from individual organizations Cisco Awarded us with something where they said we were the grand technology winner In I think 2008 and with that came money for us to develop curriculum that could be shared with other people Private foundations have given us curricular money Intel has given us curricular money And so we we go out and we try to get the money to build the stuff that we know teachers need At the student level We have gotten funding to develop workshops But once we run them on an everyday all summer basis, we actually charge a fee Using the theory that those who can pay Should and we use that money to pay for the kids to attend the workshops who can't pay by giving them scholarships So most of the money has been federally funded but about 20% has come from private foundations or from corporations who want to support what we're doing and how we're doing it Now what about those of us who would be interested in maybe Um working one of these workshops or something like that on a volunteer basis Is that available or do you actually have professional staff to make sure you have continuity across different workshops? A little of both we do have a certification process where if people want to teach in the workshops We invite them to come attend the workshop And perhaps come back and be a co-teacher in the workshop and a volunteer and helper The vast majority of our workshops are in fact not taught by Showed our staff, but they're taught by faculty who have themselves Taken the workshops have used this in their own classrooms and can speak in the first person As to the effectiveness of using the approach of modeling with students So people can get in touch with us We are doing a lot of work with exceed the workshops that are funded through exceed allow opportunities We have cited some of the workshops at Exceed provider locations and using their staff to help teach particular topics We have been we we hold the pedascale institute through blue waters At ncsa and leverage their staff to help teach what we're doing and how we're doing it They know some of the things on running blue waters certainly a lot better than we do Although we have been learning ourselves alongside as it came along So scott, this is a perfect tie-in for you here I wonder if you can tell us what your perspective of show door is and how do you partner with them and things like that I've been working with bob since the late 1980s When I started with ncsa and he came to Be a part of a summer workshop that we had for students And bob was the kind of guy that came in and not only engaged and excited the students But also the rest of the staff And bob and I have been working together since then in various capacities Um bob brings tremendous energy to these workshops and it's from their perspective of not only how he engages the students but other faculty And a critical part of this is and he hasn't really explained it yet, but how he works with others To change how they teach these kinds of topics and subjects To stop doing powerpoint slides to stop lecturing But actually engage the participants so that they're active participants in the learning process And and this has really been demonstrated repeatedly in the kinds of workshops the kind of presentations that bob gives all over the country And we've just built on that energy and that excitement And the knowledgeable people that he brings together to really make the kinds of workshops that we think are critical to changing the curriculum At all levels. So will it be k-12 undergraduate graduate? Um, it brings tremendous ideas and approaches that I think are really effective And it's been demonstrated in the changes we've seen in the curriculum in both the k-12 schools And particularly the undergraduate courses and we've We have evidence from various surveys talking with faculty that We're seeing significant change Occuring as a result of this kind of engagement with the community. It's really amazing So that kind of begs the question. How do you typically start an engagement? Does somebody come to you? Do you go seek out an organization? Or a need or you know, how does somebody find you or connect up with showed or one way or another? um, if a lot of it is uh viral um expansion where we have People who've seen things and have been successful and then they show it to their colleagues And then they want to be trained where they want to have the same experience Um, we are very mobile in the sense that we bring the workshops out across the country Uh, we've been uh, we've had faculty from more than a thousand institutions over the last 10 years attend our workshops We've done 240 some odd workshops around the country Occasionally coming back to the same place more than once but the the engagement is At multiple levels. So we may be the invited talk or the keynote At a at a regional workshop from the consortium for computing sciences in colleges The ccsc organization or we may be at an acm conference or we may be at super computing And when people in sort of the plenary See the kinds of things that we do and you know, I you know, somebody said I put on a good show Uh, you know, it's an engaging talk that people say gee, how could I do that in my own classroom? Then they find out about some of the training opportunities or they go online We have some You know self guided tutorials at showed or so that you don't necessarily have to wait till you go to a workshop But you could uh, you could go through that material online And then we do a lot of work with exceed and with the individual centers To be trying to engage their outreach efforts To to bring, you know, the the simulation across the curriculum I would agree there's a lot of word of mouth of Either people having heard bob or some of those colleagues present And just people telling one another about the value of this and then the other critical aspect Is in working with these teachers on these faculty the materials they develop We then put back into these repositories to share with the broader community And it's the ability to pick up what others have done Related to what they're trying to do in their own classroom either using these modules as they are or Modifying them So they're appropriate for what they're trying to do in their own classroom So it's really been a tremendous effort to engage the community so uh What exactly does the name show door come from? Okay, so uh That's an interesting way to answer Or to ask that question the name comes from the following story when I was a physics professor at Clemson University a young man Needed me to sign a form, but he could not remember my name So he didn't know what office to look up in the directory So we went to the department secretary and said you've got to help me I need to get this form signed. I can't remember my professor's name The only thing I can tell you is that he's short and kind of dorky looking And uh And if you take the first three letters of each of the big words In 1994 when we were starting show door We were sitting in the lawyer's office and the lawyer said what are you going to call this? And one of my board members from Clemson said why don't we call it the short and dorky foundation? And I said we'll never get away with that But I had been in the navy steve had been in the army dan had been a navy seal and the common experience is You take the first three letters of each of the big words and you make up your own name So that's where the name came from came from The fact that I happened to be short and kind of dorky looking now. Why did we use the name? We used the name because if you remember we were starting show door so that we could run workshops even if there wasn't any overhead That we were not concerned about overhead to decide what would be the appropriate use of our time And if helping other people was a good thing to do we had to find a way to do it Even if the university structure or the super computing center structure Couldn't handle that level of outreach So the lawyer said to us you can't just pick a name We have to make sure it's not derogatory or misleading And when he looked it up in the Oxford English dictionary The word show door is the name of the hammer and it's the process of turning gold into gold leaf That you have to beat on it and beat on it and beat on it And if you do that the gold will go a lot farther whatever it covers is more attractive It's less electrically Resistive it makes it better and it doesn't have to be a lot, but it has to be gold You can't use tin you can't use paper or dirt And our goal for show door was to take the best approaches for teaching math and science And beat on them and beat on them and beat on them until we could get them to spread out And even if it's kind of thin it'll go a long way And what's the point at the end of the day if all the gold sticks to the hammer All right, so we thought this was a linguistic miracle and we said we've got to go with this name And and that's where the show door education foundation name came from And why we use it Well, that's curiously appropriate That's actually pretty cool. Well, what I wanted to add is that Bob loves to tell this story when he First meets with a group And that ability to to say that and laugh really engages the community and and that's what begins that The the very vibrant interchange between Bob and every audience that he speaks with I mean that that kind of humor that kind of engagement Really builds camaraderie between the participants that and Bob is a a leader of a session Yeah, I mean we don't take ourselves too seriously, but we have a lot of fun We do a lot of good work the materials are being used by lots of people And it doesn't bother us if nobody actually knows that it's us Like I said, if you go to google and type in the words rabbits and wolves You're going to find our materials if you type in Epidemic disease model you're going to run into our materials You know, we're not first we're Wikipedia is first then harvard than us Okay, but I mean lots of things that you would want to teach dynamically Uh, it turns out that the materials that our students here in Durham At the high school and college level that have been trained by us that have worked very hard and put in a lot of hours Those materials are now being used by millions of people Around the world and primarily in this country, but around the world To engage the process of learning through running and interpreting models So you halfway answered my next question there was I was going to say How do people find you on the web and and uh start an engagement and things like that? But uh while you were talking there I Googled rabbits and wolves in a simple plot and sure enough the first google hit takes me straight to showdor.org Um, where should you go on the showdor website to Say, you know, I would like to get some kind of formal engagement rather than just use the tools I want to actually be trained and all these kinds of things So the the showdor website is laid out in such a way that there are tabs There are indicators that people should be able to see themselves. So there's a tab for students. There's a tab for educators There's the tab for parents There's a tab if you're just looking for activities and lessons And so when you come to showdor.org You should be able in one or two clicks to see Where we are able to help you in some particular way All right, and so there are there are those efforts to make it an engaging Web experience that you can quickly find yourself Uh And see yourself working with showdor because you know, we've anticipated you looking for us On the web and we've used that same approach with a project that we do in collaboration with scott and nex seed Which is called hpc university That if you go to hpc university, we've organized the resources that if you're a student There's a place that you can easily see. Oh, that's the portal for students Where that's the portal for educators, right? And so there's opportunities for us to do the same thing So a lot of self discovery um Is there and and it takes a little bit of effort, but what we've tried to do is to use Good graphics design and good web interaction to Help people more easily find us if they happen to land on our on any one of the pages at any one of the levels There there are guiding signposts that tell you how to get to the other stuff Okay, uh bob and scott. Thank you very much for your time. Uh talk to you soon Okay, anything else we can help let let us know