The Center's efforts in research, education, and outreach span K-12 through post-graduate programs.
Goals. The Center's outreach goals are to leverage our unique human and technical resources to promote a better understanding of the potential uses of computer graphics, ignite students' interest, educate teachers, and reach out to ever larger communities through the World Wide Web.
Strategy. Our strategy is to build strong programs at local levels where we can support direct interaction between program participants and our Center scientists, and then pool our combined experiences into Center-wide efforts such as the Web-based Academic Resource Project (WARP) that can affect many thousands of people. The Center's outreach programs all work to expand awareness of the relatively new field of computer graphics and encourage continued learning and participation, especially among those groups that have historically not been adequately represented. All sites are involved in establishing outreach goals and provide input to the Outreach Director through an Advisory Group for Education and Outreach that includes both external and internal members from each site.
Center outreach programs have directly affected almost 1,000 K-12 students and 150 K-12 teachers. Center educational programs directly affect almost 700 undergraduate and graduate students. Single day events, talks at educational conferences, and lab tours and demonstrations have reached over 9,000 people. The Center's work with science museums and television programs reaches thousands (for example, 52,000 people have visited the Sciencenter in Ithaca in which the Center has an exhibition).
Integrating Research, Education, and Outreach at the Undergraduate Level. Within the K-Grad range, the Center places a strong emphasis on undergraduate education and on the potential for integrating research and education. This potential is exemplified by Center undergraduate Sascha Becker. Sascha is not a typical student, but her story serves as a real-life example of the many aspects of undergraduate life encouraged and supported by the Center.
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One undergraduate's story Sascha was a teaching assistant (TA) for a Center summer outreach program for high school teachers, worked in a Center's research lab, demonstrated the Lab's research to community groups, and was a TA and then Head TA for an undergraduate graphics course. During the summers she worked at two different companies, providing a valuable connection for the Center in a fast-moving area of Web technology (virtual reality modeling language (VRML) browsers and authoring tools). She also shared her experience by co-lecturing with the Director on VRML in the Center's all-site televideo seminar during the 1997 spring semester. After receiving her degree and writing an honors thesis that included an online, Web-based educational program to teach image processing for graphics, Sascha is now designing 3D user interfaces for a start-up company (working for another Center graduate). We expect her to return many times to campus on both official and informal visits that help foster technology transfer. She brings with her to her workplace a perspective on computer graphics that is unusual for such a young employee and a sense of her connection to many communities beyond academia. Evidence of this lies in her recent start of a working group for the VRML Consortium. |
Programs for Underrepresented Groups. Throughout the Center, from K-12 outreach to undergraduate education to graduate programs and beyond, we are taking actions aimed at bringing underrepresented groups such as women and minorities into the field. Some of these efforts may affect the Center directly but most will take many years to be fully assessed and will benefit those coming after us. A range of ongoing and new programs are testimony to this effort.
Center graduate students see and interact with one another in the all-site televideo seminar and meet in person in yearly Center graduate student workshops. Incoming students have cited the Center as a reason for applying to Center university graduate programs, and exposure to the Center often leads undergraduates to consider graduate school at one of the other Center sites. This year five undergraduates involved with the Center are attending graduate school at other Center sites.
All-Site Graduate Televideo Seminar. The Center is in the fourth year of its pioneering year-long all-site televideo seminar, attended and taught by all five sites. The seminar is offered for credit at three of the sites and is attended by approximately 70 students/year, having reached almost 300 students since its inception. A unique feature of the Center graduate experience, this seminar provides access to information and people well beyond the scope of any single university. Graduate students also use the televideo system as part of a research lab without walls to discuss collaborative work. Lecture titles and abstracts for the 1996-7 academic year seminar can be found at:
Selected video tapes of lectures can be requested from the same site.
All-Site Graduate Student Workshops. Our popular week-long Center graduate student workshops are in their third year, with participants from each of the sites gathering at a different Center location each year. Nearly 80 graduate students have participated. Agendas, presentation abstracts, images and references, and student commentary from the latest workshop are available at:
Many students compare the experience favorably with a full-fledged graphics conference and feel that they have gained a better understanding not only of the work of their distributed Center colleagues, but of the field in general. The chance to visit other Center sites and see different approaches to graphics research is felt to be particularly rewarding.
Center Fellowship for Intersite Collaborative Research . A newly created $5,000-$10,000 Center fellowship for graduate students helps the Center's recruiting efforts and provides extra support for the recipient to do collaborative intersite work.
Women's Televideo Roundtable on Computer Science Graduate School and Careers.
See description in Undergraduate Programs, Section A.2.1.
Undergraduate education at all sites (with the exception of UNC, which has no undergraduate computer science program) is directly influenced by the Center. Students take innovative undergraduate courses inspired by Center research, such as a ``3D Photography'' course at Caltech, and play important roles in the Center's outreach programs.
Undergraduates at most Center sites have been co-authors on published papers. Most recently, an undergraduate independent study project, ``Fast Construction of Accurate Quaternion Splines'' by Ravi Ramamoorthi of Caltech, led to a publication, in which the student was the lead author, at the SIGGRAPH Conference, the premier computer graphics conference.
All-Site Graduate Televideo Seminar. Although technically a graduate course, this seminar is taken by almost as many undergraduates as graduates. See Graduate Programs, Section A.1
Undergraduate Research Programs. Through Center-funded undergraduate research positions and programs such as the NSF REU (Research Experience for Undergraduates) and the Caltech SURF (Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship) programs, undergraduates pursue serious research agendas. Since the Center's inception in 1991, more than two hundred undergraduates have worked in the Center's labs, more than a third of them supported with Center funds.
Women and underrepresented minorities often arrive at college with an interest in science and computing but become discouraged and chose to major in other areas. The Center's programs for underrepresented groups are designed to identify interested candidates early in their college careers and provide the necessary support to help them feel at home in science courses and research labs. A Center program for incoming minority freshmen will be run for the first time this summer (see Section Education and Outreach, B.2).
The Utah ACCESS Program. Started in 1990 by a Center faculty member, the ACCESS program has introduced over 120 young women to university-level research in science and technology (20 each year) by providing both academic and social support systems. During an eight-week summer course before their first year at the University of Utah, ACCESS students get a feel for research by tackling real-world problems in a mentored setting that includes instruction, laboratory work, and team work on assigned problems. Supported by a $2,500 stipend during the academic year, ACCESS students are placed in a science, engineering, or medical research lab. The large majority continue to work in research labs throughout their undergraduate careers. Center faculty are involved in the program and the Center funds two of the participants. For more information, see:
Undergraduate Research Access. An outgrowth of the Cornell Summer Session for Design Professions (see Pre-College Programs, Section A.3) for high school students, this Center program helps students interested in computer graphics get sufficient background in math and computer science to participate in the field more effectively at any technical level. The inaugural group consists of four black women.
Women's Televideo Roundtable on Computer Science Graduate School and Careers. The Center is taking further advantage of its televideo system by hosting a series of roundtable discussions with speakers and audiences from different sites of the Center. The first talk, with four female faculty and a Ph.D. student speaker (representing four of the five sites), had over 50 undergraduate and graduate participants (from all sites), including members of the ACCESS Program. This roundtable was designed to help students understand the options open to them in both academia and industry and to extend their network of female colleagues.
The Center is augmenting its intensive local hands-on outreach programs with materials development efforts. This strategy lets us build on the entire Center's outreach and educational experiences and leverage them to greatly expand our influence.
Interactive Tools for the Classroom of the Future. The Center has worked for several years on an ambitious education outreach project called Interactive Tools for the Classroom of the Future. In this project a postdoc, graduate student, and undergraduates work together to develop visualization and physical simulation tools for science education, using a fully interactive 3D environment including object behaviors derived from the laws of physics. Based at the Cornell site, this project has drawn on Center software resources from several other sites, including UNC's OBB-Tree collision library and Brown's VRAPP library. The simulation tools are being tested in local classrooms and established at the Ithaca Sciencenter. One year has been funded by EHR, and funding for ongoing development is being sought. This project and related activities have involved 10 material-creators and have impacted hundreds of students.
Web-based Academic Resource Project (WARP). The WARP project is a set of applets and other Web-based teaching tools created at all the Center's sites by faculty, graduate and undergraduate students, and staff. They incorporate a range of computer graphics subject matter taught in the Center, from linear interpolation for animation to wavelets and color perception. The interactive materials are appropriate for a range of educational levels, from high school to the graduate level, but emphasize undergraduate-level courses. This project has just begun but has the potential to become a significant resource for thousands of students and teachers in the coming years. See:
Opportunities offered by the Center have brought Center researchers in contact with large numbers of K-12 students and teachers (nearly 1,000 K-12 students and 150 K-12 teachers). Connections have been created with groups that historically have had little interaction with university researchers and research labs. The pre-college programs are designed to contribute to the Center goal of drawing more students into computer science and computer graphics. Emphasis is increasingly on programs that encourage underrepresented groups, such as women and minorities, to participate. The experiences gained in intensive, hands-on workshops are being distilled into interactive materials that can potentially be used by thousands of students and teachers.
The Utah High School Computing Institute (HSCI). Now in its seventh year, the five-week HSCI was started by a Center co-PI and continues to provide an important regional service for 30-40 high school students each year (almost 300 since the program began) from across the entire state of Utah, including many rural areas. Just as some students are disadvantaged by race or gender, others struggle with geographic destiny--they are simply too far away from centers of academic excellence to grasp a fast-changing field like computer science or to be exposed to a nationally recognized research lab. In addition to the summer activities in programming, computer graphics, artificial intelligence, and Web design, year-round workshops and an increasing number of Web connections keep students involved long after the initial summer program. See:
The Summer Workshop in Computer Graphics and 3D Modeling/ The Greenhouse. For five summers, the Center has run an intensive three-week workshop for high school teachers within commuting distance of Brown University, reaching over 50 teachers, many of whom have participated for several years. Lectures are given by the Center Director and Outreach Director, with enrichment lectures by other PIs. The teachers' adoption of the Workshop materials has impacted several thousand students. See:
Now that a critical mass of trained teachers has been created, we are shifting the emphasis of this program from lectures to material-development. Workshop participants are creating teaching materials to help high school teachers use computer graphics more effectively in courses ranging from computer science, math and physical sciences, to art and design. This project, called The Greenhouse, A Curricular Resource Project, can be explored at:
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An Example of Workshop Influence on a Local School Teacher and Her School's Infrastructure Linda DiVittorio, a part-Native American computer science teacher at Sharon Public High School, attended our Workshop for the first time in the summer of 1993 and came back for three more summers as a mentor teacher for other participants. She learned basic computer graphics concepts from Center Director Andries van Dam and immediately started applying them in her programming courses. Autodesk, Caligari, and Macromedia all donated copies of high-end software to the Workshop for teachers to take back to their schools. When Linda discovered that her school's computing equipment was too obsolete to run the software, she demonstrated to her principal on her own computer. Impressed with the software and the Center's interest in the school, the principal found money for more machines. The excitement grew, and two years ago Linda led a successful effort to lobby the school board for better and larger computer labs. Now teaching on Pentium-based machines, Linda has developed an entire series of lesson plans for computer graphics to be used in AP computer classes. Not only does this additional unit make the class more interesting, but Linda has found that many female students who previously were not interested in CS want to take her class to learn how to make computer images and animations. We are helping Linda put her lesson plans, assignments, pseudocode and Pascal code on the Web, along with examples of student work (See http://www.cs.brown.edu/stc/outrea/greenhouse/nursery/programming/home.html). Her work has inspired many students, some of whom she has brought to Workshop meetings. One of these students was just accepted at Brown and will be working at the Brown site starting this summer. |
Cornell Summer Session for Design Professions. For the last four years, the Center has worked with Cornell's Summer Session on Design Professions to introduce approximately 70 high school students per year to computer graphics (over 300 students since the Center began). A group of minority students (usually six or seven) join this program as part of the Cornell Pre-Freshman Summer Program. Two of last year's minority freshmen are returning this summer to work with the Center.
The Center hosts a two-week portion of the program in which students attend lectures during the day and in evening sessions work with undergraduate and graduate student researchers, gaining hands-on experience with advanced workstations, 3D scanners, 3D modeling software, digital photography, and color output devices. At the request of students, PI Donald Greenberg holds special discussion sessions to talk with participants about continuing study in engineering or computer-aided design. See:
The Artemis Project. The Artemis Project, a five-week summer leadership program designed and led entirely by undergraduates, was inaugurated last year with 10 participants. The Project is directed toward inner-city public school girls about to enter the ninth grade (a time when many girls lose interest in science). The Artemis goals are to enhance self-confidence, introduce participants to a university setting, and build leadership skills through hands-on experience with computers and discussion of important issues relevant to the lives of women and girls. Artemis is now funded entirely by the Center and local companies and includes forums in which the participants meet with the Center Director. See:
Minority Youth Program. Center faculty and a PI have been regular participants in the Minority Youth Program since its inception in 1993. Organized by the NSF Center for Research on Parallel Computation, this program brings over 100 minority high school students from the math and science magnet high schools of Los Angeles County to Caltech for several days of first-hand exposure to research and the application of science, math and technology. The goal of the program is to encourage minority youth to prepare for a math- or science-related career.
Minority Teachers Computational Sciences and Graphics Awareness Program at Caltech. See Section A.4.
Cornell Summer Session for Design Professions. See Pre-College Programs, Section A.3.
As a nationally funded organization, the Center takes pride in its open-door policy for all interested groups, from academics to industry to local schools.
Tours and demonstrations of work in the Center's research labs (and of the interlinking televideo system) continue to expose large numbers of visitors to the state of the art in computer graphics. Each site hosts several hundred visitors a year and UNC alone last year hosted over 1,400 tour participants, more than half of whom were either women or underrepresented minorities.
The UNC site focuses its outreach efforts on tours, devoting at least one day a month to tours and demos (the equivalent of running a yearly full-time three week outreach program). Virtually every one working in the lab, from the site PI to undergraduates, contributes to this demanding and unusually strong commitment to the public.
Talks at Center labs have included a Center faculty talk for the Minority Teachers Computational Sciences and Graphics Awareness Program at Caltech for the last three years, and talks for the last two years on Virtual Environments for the Duke-based Talent Identification Program. (This program identifies exceptionally gifted eighth graders from 16 neighboring states and invites them to a one-day symposium.)
Half-day events have included hosting four Saturdays of 50 students/day from The Saturday Academy, a program sponsored by Equity 2000, a partnership of the College Board and six school districts nation-wide, including Providence, RI. The Saturday Academy in Providence engages primarily minority and economically disadvantaged students in hands-on mathematics activities in university and college environments.
For the last four years, the Cornell site has hosted large-scale events for middle-school children during NSF's annual National Science and Technology Week, often using the televideo system with other sites.
For over three years, the Center's Cornell site has maintained a strong relationship with the Sciencenter in Ithaca, a highly visible community-built center for informal science education. This relationship continues to augment Center outreach programs and expose thousands of visitors to the World Wide Web and innovative 3D computer graphics science simulations. See:
The computer graphics industry continues to hire a significant number of Center students, many for key positions. This is a highly effective form of technology transfer and our students are among the most sought-after in the industry. We have just learned, for example, that two Center graduates (one from Brown, the other from Caltech) have been chosen to design Pixar's next-generation animation system. Center graduates have also started a number of their own small companies, several of which have been quite successful.
Many tools and techniques developed in Center laboratories have emerged in commercially available products, including products influenced by Center research in physically based modeling, computer-aided design, radiosity, virtual reality techniques, geometric modeling and 3D user interface widgets.
While working in industry, Center students frequently return to their schools to recruit new students.
The Center has maintained research relationships with many U.S. hardware and software companies. Current relationships include Sun, HP, Division, IVEX, Alias/Wavefront, Autodesk, Mitsubishi, and Microsoft. Center labs have received recent equipment grants from HP, IBM, Intel, Kodak, SGI, Sun, and Tanner Research.
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A long-term relationship with HP has resulted in research collaborations, technical discussions, and exchanges of personnel, as well as equipment donations (the bulk of Caltech's computers are from HP). Exchanges of personnel have taken place at the highest levels, with Frederick Kitson, HP Department Manager of Visual Computing and a Senior Technical Contributor, spending a year's a sabbatical at the Utah site and founding Director Donald Greenberg is on sabbatical at HP for the spring 1997 semester. In 1996, HP bought Division, Inc.'s lab in Chapel Hill, in order to acquire development rights for the PixelFlow graphics supercomputer system. The PixelFlow technology, created and developed at UNC with strong Center influences, is being incorporated into HP's future product lines. (The PixelFlow project is nearly completed and will be unveiled at SIGGRAPH 1997 in early August.) HP also has long-standing connections with researchers at the Cornell site and has a great interest in the Center's physically-based simulation technologies for application to digital photography, color science, and printing. Center staff, graduate students, and postdocs have spent time in HP laboratories, and HP staff have made repeated visits to Cornell for research presentations and discussions. |
Center researchers are working in advisory or consulting capacities with a number of companies, including Lightscape Technologies Inc., San Jose, CA, INSO's Electronic Book Technologies, Inc. and the Fraunhofer Center for Research in Computer Graphics, both based in Providence, RI, the Center for Complex Systems and Visualization, Bremen, Germany, and Wholly Light Graphics in Jerusalem, Israel. Center PIs also hold positions on the technical advisory boards of Integrated Computing Engines, Inc., and Microsoft Research. In addition, the Center Director is Chairman of the Board of Numinous Technologies, Seattle, WA.
Two Center PIs hold positions on the technical advisory board of the Fraunhofer Center for Research in Computer Graphics (CRCG), and Fraunhofer IGD, the parent company, based in Darmstadt, Germany, chose Providence, RI as the site for its only US branch in order to be near the Brown Center site.
Both the Center and the CRCG are working on large-scale telecollaboration projects. The CRCG is supplying the Center with a Barco Baron stereoscopic rear-display table so that gestural modeling techniques can be integrated into CRCG's custom CAD system. The Center will also benefit from the CRCG's ATM connection with Fraunhofer IGD in Darmstadt and will contribute to the development and testing of VRTP (Virtual Reality Transfer Protocol), among other projects. (Just as the HTTP protocol brought together various network protocols for the WWW, VRTP seeks to do the same for VRML, combining and optimizing various existing network protocols in order to handle unbounded 3D graphics and large-scale virtual environments.)
The Brown site has a research relationship with NASA for the Center's research program in interaction for scientific visualization. This three-year contract has been awarded an unprecedented fourth year. Researchers at the Utah site have submitted a proposal to NSF and ARO to develop graphical and haptic rendering and interaction techniques for scientific visualization to be conducted in collaboration with researchers at NASA Ames and the Brown site.
Center members are part of a MURI grant to develop the mathematical infrastructure for robust virtual engineering. The primary goal of this interdisciplinary grant is to develop mathematical and computational methods to integrate diverse approaches to modeling and simulating systems of rigid, flexible, fluid, and heterogeneous interacting objects. This MURI program proposal includes collaborative relationships with AFOSR and among the university researchers and DoD personnel.
Center PIs have served on several government boards, including the NRC's Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, DARPA's Information Science and Technology Study Group, the Blue Ribbon ERC Panel, and the NSF board for the 1996 CAREER awards.
Center research is presented each year at conferences. In 1997, at SIGGRAPH (the premier computer graphics conference) alone, Center members are chairing a panel, are authors on 14 papers out of 47 (over 25 authors), and teaching in four courses. Over the life of the Center, Center members have presented over 300 papers, 50 at SIGGRAPH conferences.
The Center is also committed to working with academic and industrial communities outside of computer graphics. PIs and other Center members regularly work with people from a variety of fields, ranging from architects to engineers to physicians. Participating in the advancement of medical technology and working with the medical community has long been a focus. The tangibility of the impact of our work is illustrated by an award bestowed on Henry Fuchs, who is both the Federico Gil Professor of Computer Science and Adjunct Professor of Radiation Oncology at UNC-CH. He received the 1997 Satava Award for his ``commitment to the transformation of medicine through visionary applications of interactive technology.''
PI Don Greenberg, in addition to being the Director of the Cornell Program for Computer Graphics and a Professor in the College of Architecture, Art, and Planning at Cornell, now also has a teaching appointment in the Johnson Graduate School of Management. His course ``Imaging and the Electronic Age'' introduces business students to emerging technologies and changing paradigms of communications and computing.
Three of the five Center PIs are now members of the National Academy of Engineering.
The Graphics and Visualization Center was proud to help sponsor the 1995 Memex and Beyond Symposium commemorating the 50th anniversary of Vannevar Bush's famous essay, ``As We May Think.'' This symposium was chaired by the Center Director and included many high-profile speakers. An article by Rosemary Simpson and the Center Director in ACM Interactions (vol.3, no. 2), ``50 Years After `As We May Think': The Brown/MIT Vannevar Bush Symposium,'' synthesizes the major themes of the symposium and builds concept maps of the original article and the projects it inspired. The Memex and Beyond Web web site, developed in conjunction with that symposium, is a major research, educational, and collaborative web site integrating the historical record of and current research in hypermedia. See:
The Center Director chaired the 1997 Interactive 3D Graphics Symposium (I3D). A Center tradition (the conference has been chaired by two other Center PIs in the past), I3D 97 provided an important focus for new work in real-time interactive 3D graphics and multimedia. Eight of the 24 papers accepted were from the Center. A video record is available and the proceedings have been published by ACM Press. This conference received much of its funding from industry sponsors and many industry participants sat on its committees, presented papers, spoke on panels, and, of course, attended the conference.
The Center has played an important role in establishing the Virtual Reality Modeling language (VRML). A Center member was an early member of the VRML Architecture group (VAG) and the Center Director was recently chosen to serve a two-year term on the new VRML Consortium's Board of Directors. The VRML Consortium, formed at SIGGRAPH 96, subsumes the VAG and consists of a Board of Directors, a standards and specifications committee (the VRML Review Board, VRB) that will work with the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and various working groups such as marketing and education.
In keeping with our philosophy of sharing knowledge, we have made software and educational resources available over the Internet. These range from programming environments for scientific visualization to VR libraries to the exact dimensions and material properties of the ``Cornell Box.'' Space precludes a full listing but all the Center's on-line software can be accessed from:
When the Center was founded in 1991, industry funding in computer graphics for university research collaborations and donations of equipment and software were far larger than today. The Center is striving to adjust to the new climate by proactively strengthening industry and government ties. The Center will continue to pursue new industry collaborations focused on research, licensing, technology transfer, and exchange of personnel.
We are continuing to refine and improve the education and outreach programs discussed above; we list new initiatives or significant changes to ongoing programs below. In addition, we are beginning to consider, with the help of the Advisory Group for Education and Outreach, which programs are the best candidates for long-term funding beyond the Center's 11th year. Criteria for this decision will include the potential for expansion, the likelihood of partnering with larger programs to assist in systematic change efforts, the impact on underrepresented groups, the existence of relevant grants, and expressions of corporate interest. We will obtain professional assessment advice for the programs selected while seeking substantial outside funding.
Web-based Curriculum Development for Introductory Computer Graphics Courses. In a combination of research, education, and outreach, the Center is working on an on-line interactive curriculum for an introductory computer graphics course. Currently the Brown and Utah sites are working together to create initial applications and test them in course settings. The Center is discussing forming a partnership with MIT to merge the Center's work with a large-scale integrative system for online interactive introductory computer science courses currently underway at MIT.
We will also work with Morehouse College to adapt our interactive teaching tools for use in their introductory graphics course and are making all of our introductory programming and graphics course materials available on line for their use. This partnership holds great promise for establishing a strong connection between the Center and an historically minority institution.
WARP for Women: Summer Art and Design Project (Undergraduate). A subset of the WARP effort, this summer project has the goal of creating applets to help introduce female students to the computer through art and design rather than through technical instruction. Three Center-funded Brown undergraduate students, including a woman programmer, will create interactive, Web-based applets for art and design that introduce technical concepts as part of mastering an art or design concept.
A Bridge Course for Introductory Computer Science (Pre-College/Undergraduate). The goal of this new Center course (to be taught in the summer of 1997 for a pilot group of six students) is to welcome incoming first-year minority students into computer science. We will provide a supportive environment and teach skills that increase the likelihood of the students taking and enjoying introductory computer science courses. Students will meet and hear lectures from the Center Director as well as other faculty members. The program is designed to convey the excitement of several areas of computer science, and also to show how basic knowledge in computer science can be applied to a wide range of other endeavors in academia and industry. The course is co-sponsored by the Center and the Leadership Alliance and is administered in conjunction with Brown University's Summer Studies Program.
Women in Science (WIS), A Brown Summer Studies FOCUS Course (Pre-College). In this three-week course for high school students, to be taught for the first time during the summer of 1997, young women will explore topics in computer science and engineering in a supportive, ``majority'' environment. WIS was initiated, designed, and will be taught by a female Center Master's student and a female Brown University undergraduate, with the help of a female TA funded by the Center.
Extending the All-Site Televideo Course Concept to K-12 students (Pre-College). We plan to extend our successful all-site graduate seminar to other educational levels by creating a Center seminar series for K-12 students. The goal is to help build confidence during crucial transitional years and share our Center-wide technology with the students in each of our local areas. We will focus each semester on a different transitional year: fall 1997 will feature 2-3 lectures for students moving from elementary school to junior high, 2-3 lectures are planned for students moving from junior high school to high school in the spring of 1998, and 2-3 lectures for students moving from high school to college are planned for the fall of 1998.
Presentations and discussion will be delivered by faculty, graduate students and undergraduates from rotating sites to audiences of neighborhood children from schools near all the sites. We will target inner-city schools at which educational outreach and support during transitions are most needed.