Education – SIGHPC Education Blog

Teach the Teacher at SC22

written by Dhruva Chakravorty

On November 12, 2022 at the Supercomputing 22 conference at Kay Bailey Hutchison Conference Center in Dallas, Texas, HPRC, in partnership with Edward J Evans, Associate Vice President for Enterprise IT Operations at Texas A&M University, conducted a teacher hands-on symposium. Sixteen teachers registered for the event. These teachers represented career and technical education, computer science, technology applications, health science, and business technology from middle schools and high schools in Texas. There were eleven attendees.

HPC Education & Training Materials Survey Highlights Interest in Sharing Materials More Widely

written by Kate Cahill

The utilization of computing technologies is rapidly expanding in many sectors, necessitating access to high-quality education and training materials to facilitate research computing. The demand for instructional materials, encompassing a wide range of topics related to the development and application of research computing technologies across disciplines, is crucial for both formal classroom settings, informal training, and self-paced learning.

One way to meet this need and keep up with the ever-evolving landscape of HPC educational and training material development is to improve how the community shares and finds materials.

The Early Career Program Helped Four Young Professionals Thrive and You Can Too

This post was written by Marina Kraeva and reposted from the SC’22 blog.

Having just earned her PhD in computer science from Georgia Tech University in 2021, Thaleia Dimitra Doudali was ready to embark on the next phase of her career.

At the urging of her advisor, Ada Gavrilovska, she applied for and was accepted into the Early Career Program for SC21 in St. Louis. The series of workshop-style sessions, pre-conference webinars and mentoring opportunities with experienced HPC professionals made a major impact on Thaleia during a transformative moment in her career.

CS Interview #3: GWC Summit held by Amador Valley Girls Who Code Club

Amador Valley High School Girls Who Code club (AVHS GWC) is a chapter of the national GirlsWhoCode organization. Through introducing girls to coding, they hope to inspire girls to pursue careers in STEM and close the gender gap in technology. For my third interview in my CS Students Interview Series, I talked with Anusha Maheshwari from AVHS GWC about their award winning GWC Summit.

When did you host the first GWC Summit and what inspired you to host the summit?

We first hosted the GWC Summit in March 2020, and we were motivated by patterns in the statistics when it comes to girls in STEM, particularly in the tech sector. Studies show that girls tend to be interested in STEM at around age 11 but drop off at 15 due to a lack of opportunities to further this interest. In today’s workforce, women make up only 25% of the computing workforce, so we wanted to do something to give younger girls the opportunity to explore tech in a supportive environment.

What are your major goals in hosting this summit?

The main goal of the summit is to develop younger girls’ interest in STEM and to show them how fun coding can be! We hope to encourage the next generation of coders to pursue their dreams and to instill in them the confidence that they can succeed in a STEM-based career.

CS Interview #2: 2020 Congressional App Challenge Winner

Hello! For my second interview in my CS Students Interview Series, I talked to Audrey Ha, a winner of the 2020 Congressional App Challenge (CAC). The CAC is a prestigious prize that students can win by designing, creating, and coding an app that fits the district-specific challenge. The CAC was created by members of the US House of Representatives with the goal of teaching middle and high school age students how to code. For more information, check out the CAC website: https://www.congressionalappchallenge.us/about/.

Audrey Ha heard about this challenge through her local high school’s AP Java teacher. For the challenge, she focused her app on hurricane relief for two main reasons, the first being that the 2020 hurricane season was a record breaking one. Second, she thought that the speed and accuracy of machine learning could help the US organize relief efforts for natural disasters. Her award-winning app, SurveyHurricane, uses artificial intelligence to accurately and quickly detect damaged houses on aerial imagery of storm-impacted regions. Her app uses object detection and image classification neural networks to locate these damaged houses.