Teaching/outreach
Several excellent collaborators (including Rhonda Crespo, Ed Fenimore, Leina Gries, and Paige Prescott) and I have been developing a pipeline that prepares students to do research.
Most of this is now under the umbrella of the Institute for Computing in Research: we pay students to spend a chunk of the summer doing research, paired with an active researcher in a field the students are interested in.
Here are some links to what leads up to that:
- Overall pipeline description
- From computer programming to math working groups to the Research Skills Academy and finally to paid internships … see our (currently draft) Wikipedia page.
- Serious Computer Programming for Youth
- I teach weekend workshops to get students familiar with Python programming on Linux.
- Serious programming mini-courses
- Designed with Leina Gries, and with contributions from Sophia Mulholland, and Ray Heil, I teach drop-in mini-courses every other week. We work from the chapter list of the small courses book.
- Research Skills Academy
- Focused more on the very importnat non-computational aspects of research, the Research Skills Academy is a 3-week remote summer program with extensive tutorials, case studies, and projects.
- Math working groups
- For students who want to go beyond what their school covers, and learn the math techniques used in real world research (rather than the canned problems in school textbooks). Right now we have two levels: advanced analytic geometry and math approximation techiniques.
- Institute for Computing in Research
- The final step of our pipeline is to come intern at the Institute.
- Guest lectures, special topics, professional development
- I love teaching and giving lectures, so I’m available to visit any group or department or school and teach the subjects I’m an expert in. Please contact me about this, especially if it can lead to getting more students involved in our pipeline.
And a separate thread:
- Youth chess club
- I played chess a lot when I was a kid, reveling in the fact that Milan had 3 full time chess clubs. It’s hard to reproduce that in a small town like Santa Fe, but I do what I can: the Nowak’s Knights chess club in Santa Fe meets every Wednesday evening for a couple of hours, and we teach kids to play chess and have them play each other.