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Computing in Higher Education: the Athena Experience

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Computing in Higher Education: the Athena Experience '*"••! SPECIAL ISSUE COMPUTING IN HIGHER EDUCATION: THE ATHENA EXPERIENCE Project Athena at MIT is an experiment to explore the potential uses of advanced computer technology in the university curriculum. About 60 different educational development projects, spanning virtually all of MIT's academic departments, are already in progress. EDWARD BALKOV1CH, STEVEN LERMAN, and RICHARD P. PARMELEE Computing has been widely discussed as having the concerning the use of computation in the curriculum, potential to radically change higher education.1 The we then proceed to develop a model of computation advent of low-cost, high-performance personal com- that could sustain those potential uses. Finally, we puters has been touted by some as the savior of the examine how the wide-scale implementation of this American university system and condemned by others model might in turn influence the university as an as the beginning (or even the final stage) of its downfall. institution. With the veritable blitz of media attention that has The ideas presented here are derived from our work been focused on the educational uses of personal com- on Project Athena at the Massachusetts Institute of puting over the past few years, it has become increas- Technology (MIT). Introduced in May 1983, Project ingly difficult to realistically assess the actual changes Athena is an experiment to explore the potential uses this new technology is likely to accomplish. Part of this of advanced computer technology in the university cur- difficulty has resulted from the largely technology- riculum. MIT has enlisted the assistance of the Digital driven frame of reference in which computation has Equipment Corporation, the International Business Ma- been viewed; universities have often simply accepted chine Corporation, and other corporate sponsors, each the specific technologies of current hardware and soft- working independently with MIT. These corporate ware before asking how they might use them. sponsors are providing (as grants to MIT) the hardware, In this article the use of computation in higher edu- software, equipment maintenance, and some of the cation is approached from an entirely different perspec- technical staff. The university itself is raising $20 mil- tive. We begin by speculating on how computer tech- lion to support the needed software, operations, and nology—in its broad sense—might be of actual use in staff. By the end of the project, MIT will have installed the curriculum, and we do not overly concern our- a network of about 2000 high-performance graphics selves with the question of whether those uses are workstations. More importantly, about half of MIT's $20 practical within the context of current technology. In million budget has been made available to faculty particular, we seek to identify areas where current members for the creation of new-applications software educational methods have observable deficiencies to be used in MIT's own curriculum. About 60 different that might be alleviated by the use of appropriate educational development projects—spanning virtually software/hardware combinations. all of MIT's academic departments and collectively of- After presenting some pedagogically useful paradigms fering a wealth of ideas about how computation can be used jn the curriculum—are already in progress under 2 'See The President's Report, 1983-1984, by D. Bok. Harvard University, Cam- the auspices of Project Athena. bridge. Massachusetts March 198S, for a recent and cogent contribution to this debate. 'See Faculty /Student Projects, Project Athena. MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts, ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Issue O ACM 00014782/85/1100-1214 75* 1985. for more detailed descriptions of these projects. 1214 Communications of the ACM November 1985 Volume 28 Number 11 Special Issue POTENTIAL EDUCATIONAL the chances are increased that the results presented USES OF COMPUTATION may be artifacts of flaws in the model, in its evaluation, In an academic setting, computer systems could proba- or even in the presentation itself. Making simulation bly be used in five distinct ways. First, the original use more central to the educational process carries as a of computers as an integral part of teaching and re- concomitant the requirement to give it some greater search in computer science and electrical engineering emphasis in the curricula. Simulation is now emerging will undoubtably continue. Second, the current admin- as a potential form of scientific inquiry, paralleling the istrative use of computers for financial management two more traditional modes of theory and experimenta- and other record keeping will also remain. Third, the tion. If this admittedly controversial trend continues, fairly recent availability of generic software for text the computer will undoubtably become a central ele- processing, spread-sheet analysis, personal database ment for teaching students how to devise simulations management, etc., has already become widespread as part of the scientific method. within universities. Fourth, the use of computers for electronic mail and related forms of asynchronous com- The Computer as a Laboratory Instrument munication is still in its early stages. And, fifth, what The creation of meaningful laboratory experiences, par- will probably be the most controversial use is that of ticularly at the undergraduate level, has often been a the computer as an integral part of the instructional frustrating task for universities. High-quality laborato- process. Focusing on the fifth point, we will explore ries are expensive, and many universities have been in this section some possible future academic uses of unable to recapitalize them as technology has ad- computing. vanced. Most students can recall the disappointing experi- The Computer as a Simulator of Complex Systems ence of recording data in a lab subject, only to find that One of the most common requests in faculty members' the results bore virtually no relationship to the theory proposals to Project Athena is to use the computer as a taught in class. The cause of this frustration with labo- simulator for physical or social phenomena that are too ratory experiences may go back to the unrealistic way complex to be understood from mathematical formula- in which we have gone about creating such courses. tions. The subject areas involved are as diverse as or- First, real insight from experimentation is rarely de- bital mechanics, supply/demand equilibriums in eco- rived from a single experiment—students should have nomic systems, turbulent flows of fluids, electromag- a wide range of experimental data available when seek- netic fields around charged objects, and the analysis of ing to draw inferences or to validate a theory. Second, policies on releasing water from dams into major river the student in the lab often does not have the opportu- basins. nity to correct flaws in experimental technique because In each of these areas, students have usually learned the data are acquired in a single, brief lab session that mathematical formulations that model the phenomena does not provide an immediate means of checking data under study. Many students, however, find it difficult as they are collected. Also, the particular theory that to translate the abstract, mathematical formulation into the lab is intended to illustrate is often too discon- a real, intuitive understanding that they can internalize nected (in the logical rather than physical sense) from and use in subsequent courses. Although all students the experiment the student actually conducts. Finally, T- should understand the formal mathematics, not all can experiments that yield truly significant results often re- exercise the model on problems of meaningful size, quire data to be subjected to sophisticated analysis either because of the computational effort or because techniques in order to reduce data, filter noise, etc., the answers are too hard to portray. In many cases, before meaningful inferences can be drawn. faculty confine examples to problems that are "solva- Instead of the traditional student labs, let us consider ble" on the blackboard, and students' assignments are an alternative in which data are acquired digitally by a limited to similar, often trivial, examples. Appropri- computer. The computer allows the data to be dis- ately constructed software—running on hardware with played, compared directly with predictions from the- the capacity to solve and to portray larger scale (and ory, postprocessed, stored for subsequent analysis, consequently more realistic) applications of the mathe- shared with data from students running the same or matical formulations—allows students to test their in- related experiments, and compared with data acquired tuition against the predictions of formal models. The from more sophisticated experimental apparatus. The student can be asked to pose a variety of "What if?" most obvious benefit of this approach is that many of questions about problems so sufficiently rich that not the unnecessarily tedious tasks associated with doing even the qualitative answers may be obvious. A mea- the lab exercise can be eliminated, allowing the student sure of the success of the user interface and presenta- to focus on the physical phenomena under study. More tion software, if not of the underlying simulation code subtle is the possibility for students to run their own itself, is the extent to which the student is drawn into experiments, with data being subject to analysis and this "What if?" sequence. It should be fun! To
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