Camilo Vieira Mejia, a PhD student of Purdue University, recently brought our Energy3D software to a workshop, which is a part of Clubes de Ciencia — an initiative where graduate students go to Colombia and share science and engineering concepts with high school students from small towns around Antioquia (a state of Colombia).

Students designed houses with Energy3D, printed them out, assemble them, and put them under the Sun to test their solar gains. They probably have also run the solar and thermal analyses for their virtual houses.

We are glad that our free software is reaching out to students in these rural areas and helping them to become interested in science and engineering. This is one of the many examples that a project funded by the National Science Foundation also turns out to benefit people in other countries and impact the world in many positive ways. In this sense, the National Science Foundation is not just a federal agency — it is a global agency.

If you are also using Energy3D in your country, please consider contacting us and sharing your stories or thoughts.

Energy3D is intended to be global — It currently includes weather data from 220 locations in all the continents. Please let us know you would like to include locations in your country in the software so that you can design energy solutions for your own area. As a matter of fact, this was exactly what Camilo asked me to do before he headed for Colombia. I would have had no clue which towns in Colombia should be added and where I could retrieve their weather data (which is often in a foreign language).

[With the kind permission of these participating students, we are able to release the photos in this blog post.]