[mesa-users] using MESA for education

[Falk Herwig]

Ed, 
I use MESA in both my 4th year and my graduate stellar physics class. In 4th year I have students look at the MESA paper, and we look at and interpret the MESA movies on the mesa web page (would be nice to have some more there). We also use the public library of MESA models (including the complete nucleosynthesis post-processed models) calculated by the NuGrid collaboration, available at the VO space at the CADC. Students would typically use the more realistic MESA stellar models and compare those with more simplified treatments from the class room. In order to make it easier for students to access and analyse the data we have created a downloadable virtual machine (based on the Orcale VirtualBox platform) called Nubuntu-access (http://www.nugridstars.org/copy_of_releases-and-software-downloads/virtual-box-releases). It is Ubuntu based and has the python tools and CADC tools installed to access and work with the data. A draft web page for the documentation of the available python tools is available at http://nugridpy.phys.uvic.ca. We are planning to release all of these python tools  as a python pip package very soon. 

In the graduate class students download and install the MESA code and they run the code and do a number of smaller projects, and then do a term project that could in some case even lead to a publication. An example is Chen etal. (MNRAS 440, 1274, 2014). 

In order to make MESA more easily available and useable I believe that virtual machines in the cloud are probably the way to go. We have MESA running in a Ubuntu-based virtual machine in the CANFAR cloud, and we are considering whether it would make sense to make such a service available to users. Peronally I like the Mint Linux distribution as a light-weight alternative to Ubuntu.  I think it would be useful to offer in addition to the wonderful mesa-sdk MESAMint, a Mint Linux based VM that has everything in it so that a user can start it up, download the MESA svn tree and just say ./install.

Best, 
Falk.

 

On 2014-06-06, at 10:17 AM, Ed Brown wrote:

> Dear MESA-Users,
> The MESA council would like to know about how MESA is used for education.  If you have ever used MESA for this purpose, we would greatly appreciate you answering the following questions; send your reply to ebrown at pa.msu.edu .
> 
> Thanks in advance,
> Ed
> (for the MESA council)
> 
> 
> 1. For which level have you used MESA? e.g., high school, undergraduate, graduate.
> 
> 2. How did you use MESA? e.g., used plots or movies in lectures; had students use MESA in assignments; had students use MESA for course projects.
> 
> 3. If students used MESA, what were the main difficulties they encountered (e.g., obtaining the code, compiling/installation, constructing inlists, etc.)
> 
> 4. The site mesastar.org has a section on teaching materials. Are there changes to the site that would make you more likely to upload your materials? If you could simply send (via Dropbox or email) your material to someone who would take care of posting them to mesastar.org, would this make you more likely to contribute?
> 
> 
> 
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--
Falk Herwig
Dept of Physics & Astronomy, U of Victoria
fherwig at uvic.ca, tel: +1 (250) 721-7743