B4.1.1.c The Advanced Workshop Designing and Writing Models

This third workshop is intended for those faculty teams who want to spend significant time developing a model of their own, making significant modifications to someone else's model, or in developing the curriculum materials needed to effectively incorporate a large modeling project in an undergraduate classroom or research experience. First preference will be given to those faculty have completed at least one of the previous two workshops, or who demonstrate the appropriate competence of someone who has.

The model for this capstone workshop is the work of an architect in building a custom designed house. Having seen many other houses, and having studied the actual site for the new house, the architect must start with the customers needs and the constraints imposed by budget, materials, local zoning, and local aesthetics. Design work would proceed with a general outline, site perspectives, and preliminary sketches. As information and feedback are provided from the early designs, improvements are made, and details of the house subsystems are filled in. And rather than building the house directly, most architects actually build a scale model of the house, and more and more are using computer models to explore options, lines of sight, placement of doors and windows, and engineering systems.

Faculty will be spending their time on the specifics of model specification and building, choosing an appropriate algorithm, analyzing the conditioning of the problem and the numerical stability of the algorithm, visualizing the output, and verifying the model. SCSI staff will organize fewer instructional sessions than for the previous two workshops, concentrating instead on helping the faculty teams develop their models. Each day, there will be a checkpoint discussion, led by SCSI staff, in which we will identify common modeling issues, numerical pitfalls, and touch on special topics such as those covered in the next section. We will encourage each team to develop a dissemination plan during the week, planning how their model and its classroom use could be written up for a journal or presented at a conference.