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 I & II” are college-level courses created specifically for this Governor’s School.  The classes 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 computer you will share with your partner. Other activities will include experimental setup, computer-based data acquisition, computational modeling of the system and interpretation of the results.

On Friday of the third and fourth weeks you will travel to these computational research centers:

• University of Tennessee at Chattanooga SimCenter
• The Oak Ridge National Laboratory National Center for Computational Sciences

After our visit to the SimCenter in Chattanooga we will explore The Tennessee Aquarium.

Course Materials

We will make extensive use of freely available open-source programming tools.  You will be provided with your own personal Dell Mini running Ubuntu.  The Dell Mini will come preinstalled with all the software you will need for the course.  Programming skills will be taught using the Fortran computer language.  The computational methods covered will also be implemented in Fortran.