Shodor Education Foundation’s SUCCEED Program Introduces Students to the Power of Computer Modeling

An acronym for Stimulating Understanding of Computational Science through Collaboration, Exploration, Experiment, and Discovery, project SUCCEED offers a three-week summer Scholars Program, which gives 20 students in-depth training in using modeling software. The program targets middle and high school students interested in learning mathematical modeling and pursuing science and mathematics careers, says Matt Lathrop, project SUCCEED director. One such software program is NetLogo, which is freely available online (www.shodor.org) but rarely used by high school students.

Modeling software allows students to visualize phenomena that may be too fast or too slow, too big or too small to see and comprehend in their normal lives, says Lathrop. For example, NetLogo can be used to see how an infectious disease may spread through a community. The software can be programmed to depict a disease’s rise and decline in a population, using dots that change over time—blue for healthy at the beginning, red for ill during an epidemic.

While it may sound like another way to spend the summer playing video games, the SUCCEED Program allows students to explore concepts they normally wouldn’t see until they’re in college, says Lathrop. Take Shodor’s wind tunnel for example, a 2-foot by 6-foot space with a barn fan at one end. Using the NASA-developed simulation software FoilSim, past SUCCEED students have designed and built models of airplane wings and then tested them in the wind tunnel.

After their in-depth instruction, SUCCEED students typically work in small groups to create a model of a real situation that might have an environmental impact. One group this past summer wrote a demonstration of the relative safety of nuclear waste being transported to Yucca Mountain, the proposed national repository for radioactive waste. Another group projected how training people to be citizen-enforcers of sound environmental practices could steer a locale away from certain destruction.

This year marked the tenth for the modeling camp, and along the way, the faculty at Shodor recognized something important, says Lathrop—that not only were students learning the software, but also they were learning as much, if not more, from interacting with the college interns hanging around the offices. So Project SUCCEED began to double as a farm system finding the next crop of interns. “The idea is that at the end of the three weeks, the best students are equipped to step into internships,” says Lathrop.

Jenna Ingersoll, a sophomore studying philosophy at the University of the South, was one of those exceptional students (in another program) who was in her fourth summer as a Shodor intern. One of Ingersoll’s projects was to create an online lesson called “In Straws We Trussed,” to demonstrate bridge building. The lesson was part of Engineers in Training, one of the modules SUCCEED students learn.

“People don’t realize how many materials are available from Shodor,” says Ingersoll, obviously proud that she’s contributed to the stash of interactive science activities and lesson materials available on the Shodor website.

Recently rewarded for its work in education reform, Shodor received a $2.8 million grant from the National Science Foundation to incorporate its Computational Science Education Reference Desk into the National Science Digital Library. “Our efforts to create the best science and mathematics resources to support effective reform in education have now been recognized in a big way,” says Robert M. Panoff, Ph.D., executive director. “None of this would have happened without the continuous support of the Burroughs Wellcome Fund to enable students to help us develop these outstanding materials.”