We are excited to announce a competition encouraging high school students to learn about data science and distributed computing using BOINC and World Community Grid.
As we have outlined in our October 2023 Newsletter, we have been working on establishing a stronger link to high schools. We are excited to announce a competition encouraging high school students to learn about data science and distributed computing using BOINC and World Community Grid.
The competition, Computation Moonshot, aims to have students contribute to real, useful outcomes for researchers in an exciting competitive atmosphere. The competition is organised by The Science Commons Initiative and will take place from March 25 to May 7, 2024. While the main competition is open to all United States high schools and their students, we trust this will create some global interest. Prizes will be awarded to the school with the most active contributors, the school with the most processing time contributed, and the school with the highest ratio of active contributors to students. The prizes range from science equipment to gift cards to student scholarships.
This competition is not the first grid computing competition hosted on the WCG. In 2019, Stockholm Science and Innovation School in Sweden ran a competition between 5 teams, contributing over 25 CPU years and 45,945 results in one month to MCM and MIP projects. Another one of our high school partners, Sisler High School in Canada, participated in Compute for the Cure 2021, a 2-week MCM donation competition, returning 52,392 results and earning second place in the competition. They have also hosted their own in-school competitions. Both high schools noted that competitions provided a valuable learning opportunity for students, and were an exciting way to get students motivated about grid computing. This growing group of our high school partners includes Boca Raton Community High School, which created a WCG Club and expands science curriculum by learning about WCG projects, programming and high performance computing.
We are looking forward to the Computation Moonshot competition and the opportunities it will provide to enrich students’ learning. Registration for this competition is now open. For more information on the competition and how to register, please visit the Computation Moonshot website.