The ability to break down a complex problem into manageable parts, recognizing not only its trend but also identifying the general principles that generate these patterns and develop an algorithm for solving this and other similar problems, is a highly sought-after skill set that is critical for the future technological workforce. The need for teaching computational thinking has long been advocated by many education experts. IIT has taken up the mission to integrate computational thinking in its courses and provides early access for this mode of reasoning to college and high school students by running a 3 weeks summer computational camp since 2013.
To participate, students should have at least one year of science and completion of Algebra II; however, prior knowledge of programming is not required. This admission criteria helps us reach out to a broader audience, especially to students who are novice in computational science.
Even though students come in with different levels of sophistication, the project-oriented approach manages to pair students with their subject interests at their level of preparedness. This past year, students worked on 12 projects collaboratively in small groups and prepared individual write-ups. Each project investigated a different topic in science, mathematics, data science, and engineering with emphasis in computation.
One project saw students use data obtained from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute to construct protein-protein interaction networks (PPIN), as shown on the left. These network are key to the study of diseases including many cancers. Sorting through 1,817 pairs of protein interactions, students learned how to isolate important interactions by counting the vertex degrees of the network.
Using data from the Sunspot Index and Long-term Solar Observation (SILSO), students learned to analyze a big data set of 73,000 data points in order to compute the average time span between solar maximum and solar minimum.
These activities give students a glimpse of how computational tools such as Mathematica can be employed to handle the complexity of real world problems. Mathematica is the program of choice for this course as the Wolfram Language allows participants to think and code at a higher level, therefore allowing an emphasis on computational reasoning over syntax.
Through the aid of Mathematica, students were given the opportunity to explore advanced mathematical subjects such as the study of dynamical systems. They learned how set up mathematical models from differential equations and obtain the solution using the computer algebra system. Logistic equations, various spring-mass systems, and Newton’s law of cooling were some of the topics explored in the projects. A brief introduction of chaos theory was also presented through the study of three-dimensional autonomous systems such as Lorentz equations. This project studied the behavior of solutions to the Lorenz equation, and their relation to the concept of solution stability.
Employment of computational tools are not limited to science and engineering, but permeate through all human endeavor. This fact was illustrated by introducing student to some aspects of computational linguistics such as the study of n-grams. The term n-grams refers to a contiguous sequence of n items from a given sample of text or speech. In one project, students were asked to perform an n-grams analysis on Darwin’s Origin of Species. Such analysis has application in many areas such as forensic authorship attribution where writers of anonymous criminal documents were identified.
The 2018 summer computational science course attracted 11 participants from high school across the country. Three weeks of immersive classes and projects saw students become fluent in implementing various computational ideas into programs, a skill which positions them for an exciting and interesting career in the future.
More information on the Summer 2018 course can be found here.
This course will next be available in Summer 2019: July 22 – August 9. More details will be added to this page when available.
If you have any questions, please contact professor Kiah Ong, senior lecturer of Applied Mathematics, at kong2@iit.edu.