UCES stands for Undergraduate Computational Engineering and Science, a DOE funded initiative seeking to promote the nascent field of computational science as an interdisciplinary subject at the undergraduate level. The project pursues this goal in many ways, but primarily by assembling and disseminating electronic educational materials in computational science.
The project is administered by the non-profit Krell Institute. The director of the Krell Institute is .
Currently the emphasis is on putting together "classes" in computational science at the introductory level, i.e., aimed at college freshmen and sophomores. The computational topics in each "course" are introduced and developed in the context of specific problems and examples drawn from as wide a variety of relevant fields as possible, thus stressing the interdisciplinary nature of computational science. As much as possible, each example is presented in an independent module that includes most or all of the necessary code, and which can be executed in an interactive fashion in an approach designed to stress the journey from physical problem to computational solution, with ongoing feedback for assessment.
In the near future we hope to implement more advanced courses, as well as a set of materials suited to teachers' colleges.
We actively seek people interested in innovative ways of introducing topics in computational science into the undergraduate curriculum. Those interested in contributing additional materials, or in using contributed materials for teaching elements of computational science, are encouraged to contact us and become involved in the project.
Professional recognition and interaction with an active group of like-minded educators, and ready access to the wide range of educational materials we are collecting. These materials will be available to students and educators and will be distributed via the Internet.
Those who choose to become "active members" are expected to assist the project by contributing to the store of educational materials. The size of this contribution need not be large, and could, for example, consist of a "module" containing the description and code for some computationally related problem.
Our goals are to be very inclusive in this project, at least at the outset. Thus, a "module" can be any reasonably independent building block of information from which educational materials in computational science can be assembled.
For example:
We are particularly interested in assembling a wide a range of examples of interesting problems in computational science, and actively seek problems drawn from engineering and the physical and life sciences.
