Category: 2012
Jesper Haglund from Linköping University presents a poster about our Sweden-US collaborative research on thermal visualization at the 2012 World Conference on Physics Education held in Istanbul, Turkey. Below is the abstract of the poster: “Infrared (IR) thermal imaging is a powerful technology which holds the pedagogical potential of ‘making the invisible visible’, and is […]
Run this simulation. The Kármán vortex street is a repeating pattern of swirling vortices caused by the unsteady separation of flow of a fluid over bluff bodies. It is named after the great scientist Theodore von Kármán who co-founded NASA’s JPL. This effect is observable in nature like in a stream, but you need some […]
For 14 years I was a teacher at Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School. Today is the first day of summer vacation for my friends and colleagues there. Now I work at the Concord Consortium, but I remember fondly that day when all the grades had been turned in and “vacation” began. I usually took a couple […]
It takes a lot of computation to model the atomic and molecular world! Fortunately, modern Web browsers have 10 times the computational capacity and speed compared with just 18 months ago. (That’s even faster than Moore’s Law!) We’re now taking advantage of HTML5 plus JavaScript to rebuild Molecular Workbench models to run on anything with […]
The next-generation Molecular Workbench has a fundamental feature that is both simple and profound: MW models will be embeddable directly in Web pages. This simple statement means that anyone will be able to integrate these scientifically accurate models into their own work—without having to launch a separate application. Teachers will embed MW models and activities […]
Congratulations to Siubhan F. of Cork, Ireland! She’s the winner of a new iPad for participating in our website survey. Siubhan told us how she learned of the Concord Consortium when she was on her Transition Year Work Experience at the Blackrock Castle Observatory, Cork.
The opposite of Thomas Dolby I was terrible at the first four weeks of organic chemistry. I just couldn’t get the right pictures into my head. The depictions of the chemical reaction mechanisms I was supposed to memorize seemed like just so many Cs (and Hs and Os and, alarmingly, Fs) laid out randomly as […]
Andy Zucker argues that we must transform schools to make them more engaging and effective. In “Using Digital Tools to Help Transform Schools” in the spring 2012 issue of AdvancED Source, Zucker notes that digital tools serve as an important means, not an end to transformation.
The Molecular Workbench has been downloaded over 800,000 times, making it Concord Consortium’s most popular single piece of software. We’re heading to a million and documenting in video both our history and our vision for the future. Learn from Charles Xie, Senior Scientist and creator of the Molecular Workbench, about the computational engines that accurately […]
The Molecular Workbench team has a unique opportunity—take our wonderful software and increase access to it. But we know that this is no “Field of Dreams” task. If we build it, will they come? We’re using The Lean Startup as a guide to optimize our software for the Web. It’s encouraging us to experiment to see […]