SCSU NRTS Year 5 Annual Report - Page 1
- Introduction/Executive Summary
Executive Summary of Year 5 Activities
Introduction:
The Network Resource and Training Site (NRTS) based at South Carolina State University (SCSU) has completed Year 5 of its five-year NASA/MUSPIN Institutional Research Award (IRA) Cooperative Agreement NCC 5-116. This NRTS consortium is also known as the Center for Network Resources and Training (CNRT), and includes SCSU as the lead institution and has 11 other partners in the states of Georgia, Florida and South Carolina. Nine of the 12 schools are HBCU/MIs and three are predominately-minority-attended K-12 schools. Education, research and outreach have all been impacted in a major way by the infrastructure, services and products funded and leveraged by the MUSPIN project.
Year 1 was largely one of connectivity, organization and a build-up of the lead institution. Year 2 saw the development of the partner LANs, server-client environments and a significant increase in the size of the CNRT staff. Year 3 was one in which there was a dramatic rise in training, incorporation of the WWW into classroom activities and the widespread daily use of the Internet by faculty, staff and students at all of the 12 schools. In Year 4, member schools began the transition from the original focus on the Internet and computer technology to a new emphasis on incorporating NASA products into the classroom and laboratory. Year 5 marked the complete transition for the partner schools. By the end of the original grant period, every consortium partner school was participating in one or more NASA programs outside the MUSPIN IRA.
Partnerships and Collaborations:
The SCSU NRTS collaborated with several of the other NRTS. The CNRT summer Undergraduate Research Institute in Astrophysics (URIA) is believed to the only one of its kind in the country for underrepresented minority students. It was co-funded by the NRTS at SCSU, CCNY, ECSU, TSU and one of the UTEP partners, New Mexico State University, plus the University of the Virgin Islands. A total of 10 students from these institutions spent eight weeks in residence at the SCSU campus studying astrophysics, image processing and related web and computer applications. For details see:
Another NRTS collaboration included ongoing astrophysical research and education with TSU. SCSU collaborated with a faculty member at the ECSU partner school Bennett College as part of its summer program in astrophysics mentioned above. ECSU, TSU and SCSU co-hosted the fall technical MUSPIN workshop at SCSU in November 1999, and the spring MUSPIN-NOVA workshop held at ECSU partner school Hampton University in March 2000.
The K-12 partners within the CNRT consortium continued their collaborative work on the NASA GLOBE project. They also were instrumental in the success of the CNRT Space Science Academy One for middle school students. A teacher from OW helped develop the program with the CNRT staff, a teacher from Bowman was the teacher coordinator during the camp and teachers from OW and Howard were participants in the camp. For more details see:
Consortium member Edward Waters College took the lead in partnering with SCSU and submitted an IDEAS grant to the Space Telescope Science Institute. While the grant was not awarded, the process was an excellent example of two MUSPIN schools partnering on a proposal outside of Code E NASA funding. This goes to the heart of what the NRTS IRA was intended to do.
The Lead Institution aggressively pursed a number of partnerships during Year 5 in support of its Expert Institute area of specialization in astrophysics. One partnership included becoming a charter member in the Robotically Controlled Telescope (RCT) Consortium which includes Western Kentucky University (the lead), SCSU, Boston University, the Planetary Science Institute (U. of Arizona) and the University of California-Berkeley Space Science Laboratory. This consortium will take over management of the Kitt Peak Observatory 1.3 meter telescope. After refurbishment and upgrading the facility, the telescope will be accessible in real time over the Internet to RCT member schools for research, education and outreach.
The SCSU CNRT also pursed a number of partnerships through two proposals written to NASA-MURED and NASA's Office of Space Science. Partners on these proposals included the Goddard Space Flight Center, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Kitt Peak National Observatory, the Center for Educational Technologies, Case Western Reserve University, Clemson University, Western Kentucky University, the University of the Virgin Islands and business/commercial partners National Instruments and Kansas-based A Tech.
Workshops:
Training at workshops and related activities continue to be one of the major benefits of the MUSPIN Cooperative Agreement. The consortium-wide statistics show that from Year 4 to Year 5 there was a 28% drop in consortium-wide attendance from 16,632 to 11,966 and an 83% drop in the number of sessions from 1,952 to 323. The drop in the number of sessions, in part, reflects the more specialized nature of the programs now being offered. The Lead Institution and the partners are concentrating more on NASA-related workshops and less on Internet and computer-based workshops. For example, at SCSU, virtually all workshops on web related topics are now taught by other departments on campus rather than the CNRT staff. This has allowed the SCSU NRTS to concentrate its resources on its Expert Institute activities.
Partner schools Bowman Middle/High School and Claflin College both showed dramatic increases in attendance. While this was heartening, the fact that 10 of the 12 member schools showed a decrease in attendance was disappointing. Some of this decrease can be explained by the reasons listed above. However, it also appears that the implementation of incremental funding in Year 5 by the funding agency may well have had an impact on partnership training or at least reporting of training. This method of distributing funds and its impact on activities is discussed below.
A bright spot in training during Year 5 was the opening of the MUSPIN-funded videoconference laboratory at SCSU. The lab was used to participate in the MUSPIN Space Involvement Workshop in December 1999 and to feature a live presentation to the middle school students by Dr. Aprille Ericsson-Jackson from the Goddard Space Flight Center during the Academy One camp in June 2000.
The fall 1999 MUSPIN-CNRT workshop was held on November 9-10, 1999, and ran concurrently with a research-oriented workshop on space science held November 10. CNRT hosted the research workshop at the request of the South Carolina Space Grant Consortium. Between the two workshops, a wide range of educational and research topics were covered. Speakers included scientists and educators from the Goddard Space Flight Center, Marshall Space Flight Center, Space Telescope Science Institute, the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, NOVA, and educators from of the Office of Space Science and the Earth Science Enterprise.
Separate workshops were held in March 2000 for the K-12 community and the college partners. OW High School hosted the March 17, 2000, K-12 teacher workshop. This program featured speakers from SCSU, NASA Quest and the Center for Educational Technologies (CET), the managers of NASA's Classroom of the Future. The college partners participated in the MUSPIN-NOVA workshop jointly sponsored by the NRTS at ECSU, SCSU and TSU. Four of the CNRT college partner schools sent teams to the workshop held at Hampton University in Virginia, and all four of those schools submitted NOVA proposals. Three other CNRT consortium college partners sent teams to the other MUSPIN-NOVA workshop at Prairie View A&M in April 2000. At the time of the writing of this report, one of those schools has submitted a NOVA proposal.
Summer workshop activities included the URIA and Space Science Academy One programs listed above. These workshops were designed to foster an interest in careers in space science for, respectively, undergraduates and middle school students.
Education:
A look at the Education Plan in Section VII of this report reveals a diversity of topics and activities. Everything from basic computer word processing to more advanced topics such as web publishing, Mathematica and UNIX are taught. While topics of general interest were most popular, there were numerous specialized activities such as teaching by distance learning, image processing, hands-on NOVA coursework and advanced graphics using a Silicon Graphics (SGI) supercomputer.
Year 5 saw each member of the consortium implementing one or more NASA programs on their campus. In the past, the partners were most active in the areas defined under the original IRA such as web and computer-based technology and training. By the end of this, the final year of the original IRA, every member of the CNRT consortium was actively engaged or applying to one or more NASA programs outside of the MUSPIN project. The most popular programs were GLOBE for the K-12 schools and NOVA for the colleges.
Each school developed its own, unique approach to the use of the Internet in the classroom. Orangeburg-Wilkinson High used their MUSPIN-funded lab to teach courses in telecommunications-multimedia and another in physics and calculus. Faculty members at Bowman High used their labs to teach earth, physical and biological science courses during regular hours and then accessed the WWW from their school after hours in order to complete assignments for their own graduate school coursework. Howard Middle School taught their students web publishing skills and after hours supported a student Internet Club. Since many of these students come from economically disadvantaged households and do not have access at home, Howard is their only connection to the outside world.
EWC continues to aggressively pursue a variety of NASA and other-agency grants by using its MUSPIN-funded network to access the web and communicate with distant collaborators. One such example is the collaborative arrangement with Florida A&M University (FAMU) whereby EWC serves as the satellite location for offering core Engineering degree courses as part of the FAMU B.S. degree program in engineering.
Claflin College made excellent use of their MUSPIN-funded infrastructure and training to supplement a wide range of activities such as undergraduate coursework, faculty research, Saturday academies and programs for gifted and talented students such as the South Carolina Alliance for Minority Participation. They showed a nearly three-fold increase in attendance at workshops and classes using the MUSPIN-funded facilities.
Morris College used their MUSPIN-funded web and mail server to provide access to the web to its faculty in the area of environmental science as well as a variety of science, math and pre-engineering programs. Allen University continued to use their MUSPIN-funded infrastructure to provide access to the Internet for a large number of their faculty and students through its centrally located computer lab in the library. Voorhees College continued to effectively use of their MUSPIN-leveraged, NASA-funded GIS lab for commercial ventures and in support of their newly approved GIS minor.
Likewise, at Morris Brown the sciences have benefited tremendously from web access, thanks to MUSPIN. Instructors routinely assign work, which requires students to search the WWW for resources. One example is a MUSPIN-funded chemistry faculty member who has placed chemistry notes and resources on a web server funded by MUSPIN.
Partner school FIU continues to lead the consortium in high-end applications. Several departments and programs at FIU use the MUSPIN-funded SGI supercomputer to carry out coursework related to environmental and material science as well as robotics and applied mechanics. These courses and related research projects expose undergraduates as well as graduate students to the supercomputer environment and high-end graphics applications.
SCSU continues to use MUSPIN funds for curriculum support. A physics faculty member, Dr. Dan Smith received release time funding from MUSPIN to develop a course in cosmology. He is also assisting in the URIA 2000 program, working with a team of three students who will present a poster at the fall 2000 national MUSPIN meeting.
Funding from MUSPIN for the past two years has lead to the development and implementation of a course in Calculus, which uses the Mathematica software to improve student mathematical concepts and problems solving. This project now impacts 6 course sections per year and 130 students. The student reaction to the use of Mathematica has been very positive. Even those students who must retake the course are so enthusiastic about it that they again request the Mathematica section.
CNRT provides hardware and software support for a NASA MASTAP grant to Dr. Joseph Fuller. His successful program for preservice and in-service teachers has been funded beyond the original 3 years at the level of $586,000 for an additional 3 years. He is now implementing the fifth out of a total of six years.
Research:
All member schools engaged in research report heavy use of their networks by their faculty members to support research. E-mail exchanges, listserv updates (e.g. NASA's Office of Space Science Research Announcements) and web-based resources such as NASA's Astrophysical Data System (ADS) are routinely used today thanks to MUSPIN.
At FIU the MUSPIN-funded supercomputer provides the resources necessary for them to compete for commercial customers (e.g. LTC Americas) as well as government grants, leveraging over $500,000 in funding from NSF and DOE alone. They make extensive use of these resources in the fields of environmental science, material science, robotics and fluid dynamics.
At SCSU one faculty member and 11 undergraduates use the MUSPIN-funded UNIX servers and network support to carry out astrophysical research. This support has enabled the faculty member to successfully compete for Hubble Space Telescope time, including a Cycle 7 award as a PI and a Cycle 8 award as a CoI. That faculty member continued to participate in astrophysical research by submitting a Cycle 9 HST proposal (which was not approved) and intends to submit in Cycle 10 in the fall of 2000. Numerous astrophysical research collaborations are described in Sections VII B, VIII and X B.
Near the end of Year 5, the CNRT phased out its network and NT and UNIX system support for the $400,000 DoD-funded Materials Characterization Lab in the SCSU science building. The School of Engineering Technology and Science assigned its administrator to take over that task. CNRT partially funded the Solaris training for that system administrator in a previous grant year.
The Environmental Science Program at SCSU manages the only field station in the country devoted solely to undergraduate research. A consortium of 25 institutions is part of this program, which is managed by Dr. Ambrose Anoruo at SCSU. His "window to the world" ( is maintained on a MUSPIN supported server. In 1999, Dr. Anoruo was awarded an additional grant totaling $1 million over 5 years to set up a Center of Excellence in Environmental Science at SCSU. Web support for this Center of Excellence is also provided by CNRT.
Outreach:
Programs for off-campus groups continue to be an important part of every school in the CNRT. Claflin College supports numerous outreach programs such as: (1) the Prizm Project, which targets high GPA students for summer work in the sciences; (2) Saturday Academy during the school year for students with GPAs of 3.5 or higher; (3) the South Carolina Alliance for Minority Participation; and additional programs, all of which use the MUSPIN infrastructure to excite and stimulate the interest of students. Morris College, on the other hand, used its infrastructure to reach students through the Upward Bound Program during the summer.
FIU continues to provide a challenging experience to high school minority students interested in engineering as a career through their FLAME program. Additionally, they supply email accounts and Internet access through their supercomputer to Miami-Dade Community College and others through their ALLSTAR program, which is designed primarily for the dissemination of aeronautical information.
As stated before, Howard Middle School provides a great service to a segment of the community, which is economically disadvantaged, through an after-school program known as the Howard Connection. Members of the community use the MUSPIN-funded connectivity and machines to learn about and gain access to the web, including Internet scavenger hunts.
The CNRT PI has been asked on three separate occasions during the past year to lead or participate in an Education/Public Outreach proposal on science missions funded by the Office of Space Sciences. These included the Astrophysics Theory Program (1999), the Long-Term Space Astrophysics Program (1999) and the Space Science 2000 Discovery Program (2000) on the lunar mission, South Pole-Aiken Sample Return. The first two programs were not funded and the third one is pending.