Students in a high school chemistry class study the process by which a salt goes into solution in water. On an interactive display, students view energy contours in a network of water molecules frozen in time, and find a location of low energy into which they insert a sodium chloride molecule. The RISC workstation then computes and displays the time development of interactions that dissociates the salt into ions, and shows the resulting polarization of surrounding water molecules. Student compare these results with those for other simple salts, discovering the relative rates at which different salts go into solution. These high school students consult with graduate students over an electronic network, asking questions and tapping insights of these colleagues and other professional research workers in the field.
Students have immediate access to research results, simulations, and video displays of experiments.
They can analyze particularly large systems over the network using the Boston University Connection Machine supercomputer . Large new or revised programs are installed on high school machines from the local or a distant university. It anticipates educational implications of technologically enhanced materials that can link scientific research to the increasing availability of computational power. A number of simulation programs have been developed in the area of molecular dynamics to demonstrate these concepts. Back to CPS Projects.