Bringing Research Tools Into the Classroom

摘要

The advancement of computer technology used for research is creating the need to change the way classes are taught in higher education. "Bringing Research Tools into the Classroom" has become a major focus for the Software Tools for Academics and Researchers (STAR) team at MIT. The STAR developers collaborate with faculty researchers to help solve the problems of moving computational tools used for research into the classroom. In the first two years of the program's existence, the STAR team has implemented software to bring high-performance computing (HPC) into material modeling courses, built software for protein structure visualization and hydrological analysis of watersheds, repackaged genomics software for analyzing microarray data, and provided the development environment and computational resources necessary for teaching parallel programming. The goal of this work is to make research software and data easily accessible to students and their faculty in a package that not only promotes use in the classroom, but also creates a path for unscripted discovery. This paper presents five STAR software packages that are currently being used in MIT classrooms. A STAR software package is considered successful if it enables bringing new topics into the classroom that previously could not be taught.