Category: 2012
A house designed using our Energy3D CAD software. Perhaps the most important change in the Next Generation Science Standards to be released in March 2013 is the elevation of engineering design to the same level of importance as of scientific inquiry (which was enshrined as a doctrine of science education in the 1996 science standards). […]
Design a city block with Energy3D.We were in a school these two weeks doing a project that aims to understand how students learn engineering design. This has been a difficult research topic as engineering design is an extremely complicated cognitive pr…
Gas laws are generally taught in high school chemistry. Students learn that Boyle’s law, for instance, can be expressed as P1V1=P2V2, where P is pressure and V is volume. From the equation, it’s clear that there is an inverse relationship between the gas pressure and volume, but do students understand the molecular mechanism behind this […]
[Editor’s note: Piotr Janik (janikpiotrek@gmail.com) was a Google Summer of Code 2012 student at the Concord Consortium and is now a consultant working on our Next-Generation Molecular Workbench.] Some time ago we described the core engine used in Molecular Workbench and our attempts to speed it up. At that time we focused mainly on the […]
Thanks to everyone who entered our Suggest-a-Model contest. We always enjoy hearing from teachers and love to help with hard-to-teach science concepts. If you haven’t already, please vote for the model you’d most like us to build. To Vote 1) Go to our Facebook page (you like us on Facebook already, right?) 2) Look for […]
About four years ago, I dreamed about how multicore computing could push educational computing into a high-performance era. It turns out that the progress in multicore computing has been slow. The computer I am using to write this blog post has four ph…
Orlando is the center of the thermal imaging universe in November 6-8 when it hosts the largest infrared imaging conference in the world: InfraMation. Invited by FLIR Systems, I gave a Keynote Speech on the educational applications of IR imaging in thi…
Dr. Pendred “Penny” Noyce served on Concord Consortium’s Board of Directors from 1997 to 2012. She was instrumental in launching the Virtual High School as an independent nonprofit and became chair of our board in 2008 to lead the presidential search committee.
I checked our Web log today and the statistics showed that the Molecular Workbench software (Java version) has been downloaded for 1,014,439 times since 2005. This number doesn’t include those instances in which MW is embedded in other software or run …
Figure 1 The most fascinating part of science is the search of answers to strange phenomena. In the past nine months, I have posted more than fifty IR videos on my Infrared YouTube channel. These experiments are all very easy to do, but not all of them are easy to explain. In this blog post, […]