Reaching minority, female and disadvantaged students

Adventures in Supercomputing (AiS) is an innovative educational outreach program to address the shortfall in human resources in science and engineering. The program has been funded since 1992 as part of the Department of Energy´s High Performance Computing and Communications Program. Supercomputers are used both as a magnet to draw students into science and engineering and as an enabling tool to assist them to explore simulations based on mathematical or physical models. The program presently involves 69 high schools and 5 middle schools in five states: Alabama, Colorado, Iowa, New Mexico, and Tennessee. The primary goal of this program is to capture and cultivate the interest of minority, female and disadvantaged students in science, mathematics, and computing. By improving the teachers´ computer expertise and scientific knowledge through intense training, teachers are able to reach out confidently to this target group of students. An environment to support computing education for both students and teachers is strengthened during the year through continued technical support. The paper discusses methods of encouraging minorities, women, and disadvantaged students to become involved in the Adventures in Supercomputing program. It shares achievements of this diverse school population over the past years as these students engage in long term computational science projects. It also shares the assessment results, showing the success of the program