Program Overview

Through classes, group learning and field trips to computational research centers, you will gain the experience necessary to not only succeed, but to excel in college-level science, engineering and mathematics.

Classes

“Computational Methods for Scientists and Engineers” is a college-level course created specifically for this Governor’s School.  The class will cover:

• Selected topics in calculus and vector analysis
• Elementary and intermediate programming skills
• Basic data acquisition
• In-depth study of topics in physics and engineering such as ballistics, electric circuits, structural vibrations and chaos.

Group Learning

Everyday you will be teamed with another Governor's School student to work on activities. You will be given many activities to work on everyday, the majority of those will involve coding computational techniques on a laptop computer. Other activities will include experimental setup, computer-based data acquisition, computational modeling of the system and interpretation of the results.

If possible, we will travel to computational research centers such as:

• National Space Science and Technology Center
• Oak Ridge National Laboratory National Center for Computational Sciences

Course Materials

We will make extensive use of open-source tools.  You will complete the majority of assignments on a netbook running Ubuntu Linux.  Programs will be written primarily in Fortran 95 using the gfortran compiler.  Data visualization will be done using gnuplot and Octave.