Category: 2009
Google SketchUp is a wonderful program that you can use to design 3D structures such as a building WYSIWYG-ly. It offers by far the most advanced user interface for creating 3D objects. Within ten minutes, you can sketch up a simple house with a roof,…
The Molecular Workbench (MW) software offers salient interactive simulations of electrons, atoms, and molecules that explain many phenomena from the microscopic level. What exactly is in a simulation that makes it a better teaching tool than a text boo…
The educational software market is largely dominated by cartoon movies, animations, and games. Developing these media usually requires no rocket science (i.e., sophisticated mathematics and computation in the context of this blog). But this may change …
A significant part of chemistry education is about teaching molecular structures. Before computers were widely available, many teachers used physical ball-and-stick models in the classroom. Using physical models has limitations–the variety of the mole…
“Imagination is more important than knowledge.” — Albert EinsteinScience should be taught as a verb, not only as a noun. Doing science is a compelling and effective way to learn. It is through the process of exploration, creation, and invention th…
“We have become quantum mechanics — engineering and exploring the properties of quantum states. We’re paving the way for the future nanotechnicians.” — Donald M. Eigler, IBM FellowUnderstanding how things work in the microscopic world is fundament…
It looks as if our open letter to President Obama isn’t alone. A recent post on Ars Technica kindly points us to another open letter from a group of open source vendors and advocates calling for the new administration to consider open source software in government IT initiatives and infrastructure. Of course, we’ve been thinking […]
Ruby is a powerful and dynamic open-source object-oriented language we have been using extensively at CC in the last few years for the web applications that manage and coordinate authoring and deployment of activities based on the SAIL/OTrunk framework. The standard Ruby VM is written in C and we’ve been using version 1.8.6, the latest […]
Welcome back. As we at the Concord Consortium begin to make more regular posts to our blog, I’m not exactly certain whom I’m welcoming back more: you as our readers, or ourselves as bloggers. Either way, we’re pleased to have you as part of the conversation. And we have plenty to talk about, as our […]
The next version of Java being developed is v1.7.0 and the OpenJDK version is being released as open source under the GPL license. I’ve written a wiki page describing how to build and install this new version of Java on Mac OS 10.5.6. Build OpenJDK Java 1.7.0 on Mac OS X 10.5