UC San Diego Annual Financial Report, 06–07

• Introduction
• Rankings
• Letter from the Chancellor
• Letter from the Vice Chancellor for Business Affairs
• UCSD Facts
• Addressing Community Needs
• Real World Impact
• Jacobs School of Engineering
• Health Sciences
• Biological Sciences
• UCSD Libraries
• Rady School of Management
• Arts and Humanities
• Scripps Institution of Oceanography
• Physical Sciences
• San Diego Supercomputer Center
• Social Sciences
• International Relations and Pacific Studies
• CalIT2
• Student Affairs
• Extension
• Preuss School
• Financial Highlights
• Regents & Officers
• About this Report

Though communications at times are accented with jargon befitting a national supercomputer center, TeacherTECH lessons are designed to be palatable to people with little formal science training. In an astronomy workshop, for instance, teachers explore these questions: Are astronomers in Earth’s orbit really weightless? Can a feather and a hammer both fall at the same rate? Have your students ever felt weightlessness?

Understanding Newton’s laws and their consequences on Earth and in space can be a challenge for K–12 students and teachers who lack a strong background in physics. TeacherTECH demonstrates that basic astronomy concepts can be made accessible with in-class experiments enhanced by animation and selected video clips that include a rich history of space exploration

TEACHERTECH: TRAINING
TOMORROW’S WORKFORCE AT SDSC

TeacherTECH at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) is a frontier land of “techie” jargon and gadgetry with a serious purpose. The award-winning outreach program helps educators bring new technology tools and technology-enabled science concepts into K–12 curriculum.

Teachers become students in a TeacherTECH classroom, so they can better prepare the next generation for what lies ahead. Topics range from the inner sanctum of the human body to the far reaches of the solar system—including biodiversity in California, DNA extraction, and 3-D visualization in geology. Participating teachers also learn how the latest technological advances—smart boards, podcasting, iMovies—can be applied to the classroom setting.

In 2007, TeacherTECH drew over 1,400 teachers from over 150 schools to its workshops. This represents educators who reach up to 200,000 students annually from the San Diego-Baja region. In May, the program received a Partner of the Year award from the San Diego Science Alliance, a county consortium of business, education, and scientific leaders.

Because of its demonstrated effectiveness, SDSC TeacherTECH is growing beyond San Diego. The program is being adopted by other supercomputer centers in the TeraGrid, a national network of nine National Science Foundation centers that form the world’s largest distributed cyberinfrastructure for open scientific research. SDSC, an organized research unit of UCSD and a TeraGrid founding site, is an international leader in data cyberinfrastructure and computational science.