As a nationally funded
organization, the Center takes pride in its open-door policy for
all interested groups, from academics to industry to local
schools.
Tours and demonstrations of work in the Center's research labs
(and of the interlinking televideo system) continue to expose
large numbers of visitors to the state of the art in computer
graphics. Each site hosts several hundred visitors a year and UNC
alone last year hosted over 1,400 tour participants, more than
half of whom were either women or underrepresented minorities.
The UNC site focuses its outreach efforts on tours, devoting at
least one day a month to tours and demos (the equivalent of
running a yearly full-time three week outreach program). Virtually
every one working in the lab, from the site PI to undergraduates,
contributes to this demanding and unusually strong commitment to
the public.
Talks at Center labs have included a Center faculty talk for the
Minority Teachers Computational Sciences and Graphics Awareness
Program at Caltech for the last three years, and talks for the
last two years on Virtual Environments for the Duke-based Talent
Identification Program. (This program identifies exceptionally
gifted eighth graders from 16 neighboring states and invites them
to a one-day symposium.)
Half-day events have included hosting four Saturdays of 50
students/day from The Saturday Academy, a program sponsored by
Equity 2000, a partnership of the College Board and six school
districts nation-wide, including Providence, RI. The Saturday
Academy in Providence engages primarily minority and economically
disadvantaged students in hands-on mathematics activities in
university and college environments.
For the last four years, the Cornell site has hosted large-scale
events for middle-school children during NSF's annual National
Science and Technology Week, often using the televideo system with
other sites.
Museum Programs
For over three years, the Center's Cornell site has maintained a strong relationship with the Sciencenter in Ithaca, a highly visible community-built center for informal science education. This relationship continues to augment Center outreach programs and expose thousands of visitors to the World Wide Web and innovative 3D computer graphics science simulations. See: http://www.sciencenter.org
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