Thermoregulation

Project Lead The Way (PLTW) is the leading provider of rigorous and innovative Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education curricular programs used in middle and high schools across the US. The PLTW Pathway To Engineering (PTE) program includes a foundational course called the Principles of Engineering (POE) designed for 10-11th grade students. PLTW curriculum currently reaches 4,780 schools.

According to Bennett Brown, Associate Director of Curriculum and Instruction of PLTW, our Energy2D software will be adopted in the POE curriculum to support a variety of core engineering concepts including power, energy, heat transfer, controls, and environmental factors.

Solar heating cycles

Since the release of the first alpha version in 2011, Energy2D has already been used by thousands of users worldwide, but the collaboration with PLTW will be a big step forward for Energy2D to reach more students. The timing of this collaboration is particularly important to engineering tools such as Energy2D, as–for the first time–engineering has been officially written into the US K-12 Science Education Standards. Once the Standards roll out, thousands of teachers will be looking for leading-edge tools that can help them teach engineering. This will be a great opportunity for Energy2D.

Why is Energy2D so special that people want to use it? Our website provides many self-explanatory examples. But there is one hidden gem I want to emphasize here: Its computational engine is based on good algorithms I devised specially for this simulator. Its heat solver can be so accurate that a simulation can maintain the total energy of an isolated system at a level as accurate as 99.99% for as long as it runs, regardless of the complexity of the structures in the system! The fact that the sum of energy from all the 10,000 grid cells remains a constant after billions of individual calculation steps reflects the holy grail of science and engineering. If anything, engineering is about accuracy. A good engineering tool should be able to give students a good engineering habit of mind and accuracy should be a paramount part of it.