From June 11 to August 3, in the summer of 2001, a small group of undergraduates from across the United States met on the Iowa State University campus for the NSF sponsored REU program (Research Experience for Undergraduates) on Scientific Computing.
The students were guided by a set of faculty mentors. The mentors presented scientific research problems, discussed algorithms for solving these problems, and computer programs that implement these algorithms. They also trained the participants in the necessary background in science and programming.
The students spent their first week getting acquainted with each other, their surroundings, and the goals of the program. There was an initial series of talks to present the science and computing skills needed.
The students got to know each other, and practiced their skills, by working on a small set of mini_projects involving MATHEMATICA, MATLAB, and graphics. At the end of the first week they made short presentations on their mini-project results.
The students then divided into groups, each working with their mentor on a separate large scale project for the rest of the summer:
At the middle of the project, the students began writing papers that summarized their projects and results. These papers were written in LATEX, a language that allows complicated mathematical formulas to be professionally typeset. There was a short class on LATEX to help the students get started. Some sample documents are available in the Introduction to LATEX. As a test of their skills, the students carried out a short series of LATEX tasks.
During the summer, the students visited the "virtual reality cave" at the Virtual Reality Applications Center, the Pat Schnable Laboratory, where gene expression experiments are carried out, similar to the ones that produced data analyzed by the Voronoi project, and the High Performance Computing Group, which has an Origin2000 system, and a parallel workstation farm.
By the end of the project, the mentors had helped the students put their papers into final form in LaTeX. You can examine the papers of
The papers may be submitted to an undergraduate journal, such as
There was a final presentation, at which each student group presented their results, and we celebrated the conclusion of a summer of hard work and learning.
Last modified on 10 September 2004.