PIES: Outreach
The Molecular Workbench helps educators easily develop modules that visually demonstrate physical concepts. However, it is currently limited to simulating 1000 particles or less.
We will apply the PIES tool to the Molecular Workbench simulation engine to enable larger simulations on multi-core processors, which are becoming standard on many desktops and laptops. We will also develop an educational module using the Molecular Workbench software that interactively introduces students to parallelization concepts. This module will assume as its context a multi-core parallelization of a molecular dynamics model that is relevant to their current chemistry curriculum.
By presenting an opportunity for computer science experiments in the context of parallelizing computational models, the students will be exposed to some of the exciting ways computer science is applicable to the natural sciences in general.
Our group has put together some great worksheets for use in high school classrooms. To view the worksheets, first download the Molecular Workbench software. Next, click on one of the links below and the Molecular Workbench application should be launched to display the selected worksheet.
- Evaporation by Tim Lenczycki
- Pizza and PIES August 2008 presentation, This presentation was put together by the whole group. Download it, unpack it into a directory by typing "tar xzf piesPresentation-Aug2008.tgz", and then open overview.cml from within the Molecular Workbench application.