Big Green and Big Blue form partnership

With the help of $850,000 worth of computer products from IBM Corp. the Thayer School of Engineering this fall began developing new educational software. Project Northstar, as the program is known, is a multi-year partnership between the College and IBM.

Charles E. Hutchinson, dean of the Thayer School, said, "Our goal is to create a model engineering education which is capable of meeting future needs. Project NORTHSTAR recognizes that the computer is central to that model."

John C. Daily '65 led a delegation of IBM officials attending a ceremonial luncheon with College administrators, that included President McLaughlin and Provost Agnar Pytte, to mark the lift-off of Northstar. Daily is the general manager of IBM's Academic Information Systems (ACIS) unit. ACIS markets IBM products to academia and sponsors research and development programs at the nation's top universities. ACIS contributed about $75 million for joint studies programs last year.

"IBM welcomes this important partnership with one of the nation's most innovative engineering programs," said Daily. "Not only will engineering students at Dartmouth benefit from this approach, but faculty at a wide range of universities will have the opportunity to incorporate this new software into their own curriculum, thus reaching a much broader array of students." A hallmark of the Northstar project is that the software developed at the College will be made available to other educational institutions for a modest fee, typically the cost associated with duplicating and shipping the software. Dartmouth as a whole stands to benefit from this softw are exchange system. ACIS officials noted that a variety of educational software was developed by joint studies programs at other schools.

According to Daniel Lynch, head of Northstar and Director of Graduate Studies at Thayer, a project supervisor and four programmers will write programs based on the needs and the ideas of the Thayer faculty, which will be integrated into the curriculum. The first set of programs will be available for the spring term. Lynch said writing of the programs will start with the owest level of engineering classes and advance upward. When complete, Thayer will have created a "model of engineering education designed to address the needs of the 21st century."

The hardware provided by IBM includes the firm's newly released RT personal computer. The IBM workstations will be located in clusters within the engineering school. They will be used for tasks such as data acquisition, numerical analysis, decision analysis, computer-aided design and computer engineering.