B6. Budget and Budget Justification

Budget Justification

Staff: Funds are requested for partial support of the Project Director to direct course material development, to make visits to campuses in the partnering consortia, to teach in the workshops, and to consult with faculty teams on their educational and research use of numerical models. Two months per year support is requested for this, with another month being leveraged from other NSF-funded, computational science education projects. One month support is requested for an additional Shodor scientist to assist with model building and web conversion to create interactive learning environments. Support for one undergraduate to assist with all aspects of the workshop is requested. This student will work on materials development, and will serve during the workshops and year as the editor of The Daily Observer, the on-line record of the workshop and its follow-on activities. Benefits , charged as a direct cost, are 20% for staff and 9% for students.

Consultants: Support is requested to cover one month each of Drs. Hirst, Warner, and Stevenson to provide instruction during the workshops and support during the year for faculty teams. No indirect is charged on this amount.

Travel: Our experience with the Carolinas Institute demonstrated the need for on-campus follow-up. While we intend to aggressively seek alternative funding for this travel, and our consortia partners are committed to seeking such funds, a modest amount of travel is requested to enable to Project Director and Staff to travel to individual campuses during the year to assist faculty and to give department or college seminars to raise the visibility of modeling in the classroom. Travel for presentations at two national education conferences and Supercomputing 9X is also included in our request.

Materials: Funds are requested for materials, publication, publicity and dissemination of results.

Participant Costs: We base our request for participant costs on the assumption that all 45 participants each year funded by NSF (15 faculty at each of three different workshops) will be different individuals. Some cost savings will be realized if the same person enrolls in multiple workshops, and these savings will be used to open additional workshop slots. We anticipate 45 person-weeks of workshop attendance each year, needing to provide 6 days of room and board per workshop; rates are an average of Durham facilities and the two ACS and CCCS schools who have offered to host one or more workshops. We are asking for $50 per workshop day as a stipend, since many of these faculty come from institutions with little or no chance for summer income if they give up teaching summer session to attend the workshop. We ask for funds to provide an additional stipend for faculty who document specific activities back on their campuses such as hosting a modeling day, convening interdisciplinary team meetings, and developing materials which are shared with other SCSI participants, up to an additional five days. Funds are requested to purchase one or more software packages for each attendee, so they can take the tools they have learned about back with them. We have already secured a discount for STELLA for all participants, (see letter of support) and we will work to negotiate similar discounts for other packages.

Indirect Costs: The Shodor Foundation caps its indirect cost charges at 15% of non-participant costs for externally funded grants, even though the actual amount is significantly higher.

Inflation: Our model of the world includes a nominal increase of 3% across the board in the second year.