Collegeville

The Collegeville organization is dedicated to studying, developing, teaching and promoting better computational science and engineering (CSE)

Scientists and engineers use computation as a part of their everyday discovery and design processes. In order to improve the effectiveness of computational approaches, the Collegeville Project is focused on studying, developing, teaching and promoting theory and best practices in CSE.

While many people work to improve the effectiveness of CSE while simultaneously working on a specific CSE project, we are looking at the process of how CSE work is done, as a first order concern in its own right.

Collegeville Workshop Series

The Collegeville Project sponsors a series of workshops on scientific software. These events focus on specific subthemes related to the development and use of software for science. Participants come from industry, academic and laboratory institutions, enabling a broader understanding of common and complementary topics across these communities. Details about the workshops can be found here:

• The Collegeville Workshops on Scientific Software.

Capstone Origins

Some of the content in the Collegeville Project comes from a capstone course on computer science methodologies taught by Michael Heroux since 1998. This material draws upon and develops best practices in oral and written discourse, with the basic goal of always improving each scientist's personal skills for effective communication. Two sub-projects under the Collegeville Project are:

• The Scribe Project: Effective Writing.
• The Orator Project: Effective Speaking and Listening.

Lex: Effective Software

Sagatagan: R&D of R&D

The Sagatagan Project is focused on studying, developing, teaching and promoting theoretical models for CSE collaboration. Of particular interest is the characterization and improvement of small research team dynamics. Small research teams form the fundamental social cell of science and engineering. The canonical model is a small group of people with one or a few permanent members (such as research faculty) and a group of transient members (such as students and postdocs) who come into the project, learn how to contribute, make contributions and then depart to the next phase of their career.

The Sagatagan Project is focused on model-driven approaches to improving team productivity for writing papers, developing software and more, and product sustainability for documents, software and tools.

Capturing Assignment

The Capturing Assignment Project is focused on studying, and developing the best way to collect and grade students' assignments in a GitHub repository.

This site is developed and maintained by Michael Heroux @maherou with assistance from Duong Do @duongdo27 and Jim Willenbring @jwillenbring.

Its content is used as part of a Computer Science capstone course in research methodologies at the College of St. Benedict and St. John's University in rural Collegeville, Minnesota.