The Department of Computer Science at UNC-Chapel Hill hosts approximately 875 visitors each year for various outreach activities. We currently have several programs designed to reach out to students and teachers in public schools, including research demonstrations for visiting school groups, scientist visits to middle and high school science classes, and creation and distribution of educational software for students with disabilities. The department has also played host in recent years to well-attended conferences and collaborative meetings.
Our departmental research demonstrations allow students to experience and learn about virtual environments (EVE), interactive haptic painting (dAb), videoconferencing (Facetop), multi-projector displays (WAV), and the nanoManipulator, among other projects. In addition to school-organized visits, the department also hosts children and adolescents who are involved in Scouting groups, mentoring programs, and science camps, among other educational organizations. For a few years now, we have hosted middle school girls and boys from the IBM-sponsored camps EXITE and IGNITE, where students in the Durham (NC) Public School system learn team skills in a science and technology rich environment.
The department has a particular interest in increasing the number of women in computer science. In addition to the IBM-sponsored EXITE girls camp, we have also partnered with the Women and Mathematics Mentoring Program (WAM) to bring over 400 eighth-grade girls and their mentors to the department for demos and discussion with female faculty members and graduate students. The program’s goal is to encourage these girls to take higher-level math courses in high school and learn about math-related careers.
The Nanoscale Science Research Group, which includes faculty and students from many departments, including Computer Science, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Applied Science, and Biomedical Engineering, has been taking their virtual reality nanoManipulator system to science classes in local middle and high schools for several years. More recently, the work was extended to include the study of the effect of 3D computer graphics combined with force-feedback and direct interaction with scientists on the students’ perception and learning of science. As a result of this ongoing project, more K-12 students than scientists have directly manipulated viruses by hand. For more information on this project, and a list of publications, see www.cs.unc.edu/nano/ed.
Another project, called Shaky, Sticky, Bumpy and Materials Stretching, is being used for Nanoscale education in museums and science centers: UNC-Chapel Hill’s Morehead Planetarium and Science Center, the Danville Science Center in Danville, Va., the Science Museum of Virginia in Richmond, Va., the Museum of Science in Boston, Mass., and the Museum of Life and Science in Durham, N.C., have all held demonstrations. The program was also exhibited at NanoDays 2007 and 2008 at several of the previously mentioned museums and nearby North Carolina State University. This computer simulation has been experienced by approximately 7,000 participants.
Public school students and teachers have benefited from our enabling technology research for five years now. Professor Gary Bishop and his enabling technology students have developed a range of educational software tools for children with disabilities. The software is freely distributed on the web, and sometimes via CD, and is designed to combine with inexpensive, off-the-shelf, commodity hardware to help ensure the tools are both accessible and affordable. One such tool, Tar Heel Reader, is rapidly gaining popularity. Tar Heel Reader is a web site designed to help teachers make easy-to-read books for children with disabilities, using the publishing platform Wordpress and Creative Commons images from the photo-sharing Web site, Flickr. So far, 274 online books have been created and the site has experienced over 100,000 page views. One of the earliest and most popular programs, Hark the Sound, has been downloaded almost 1600 times by users in 70 different countries and 46 states. In addition, the department has distributed 476 Hark the Sound CDs to various locations in the U.S. and 9 other countries, and has distributed over 500 copies at workshops and events.
One such event, Maze Day, has been held for five years now. Maze Day invites blind and visually impaired students in kindergarten through high school, and their parents, guardians and teachers, to the department to experience a wide variety of educational games and tools created just for them. Each year has brought approximately 100-150 students and adults. For students who are often left out of school field trips and activities because they are not members of the sighted community, Maze Day provides a one-of-a-kind day of fun and learning. The department has also held several teacher workshops, both on the UNC campus and at the Governor Morehead School for the Blind in Raleigh, NC. For more information on our enabling technology research, please see www.cs.unc.edu/Research/assist.
The department’s outreach efforts also include those designed to bring researchers together to facilitate discussion and collaboration. The Workshop on Edge Computing Using New Commodity Architectures (EDGE), held in 2006, consisted of invited presentations given by renowned researchers, panel discussions on advantages and the trade-off of various architectures and the computing needs of various applications, contributed poster presentations and live research demonstrations, and expanded breaks allowing for extensive discussion. The workshop was chaired by Drs. Dinesh Manocha and Ming Lin, there were approximately 262 researchers in attendance. Also in 2006, the Third International Symposium on 3D Data Processing, Visualization and Transmission (3DPVT 2006): The 3DPVT 2006 conference was a forum for topics that spanned a number of research fields from applied mathematics, computer science and engineering, computer vision, computer graphics, geometric modeling, signal and image processing, bioinformatics and statistics. The UNC conference chair was Dr. Marc Pollefeys and the conference was attended by 230 students and researchers from across the globe. In 2009, the department hosted the IEEE International Symposium on Asynchronous Circuits and Systems (ASYNC 2009). The conference was chaired by Dr. Montek Singh and there were approximately 60 people who attended from around the world.
Throughout the year researchers from other universities and other UNC schools and departments also visit the department to view the departmental research demos and participate with our researchers in collaborative research efforts.
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