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 the poll pinned to the top left of the page’s wall

3) Click on the idea you like most to cast your vote

Our goal is to build a custom computer model to help teach a complex, science, math or engineering concept suggested by real teachers, like YOU! We know all too well the awkwardness of jumping up and down and waving your hands to model the behavior of molecules or dancing around the classroom to model photosynthesis.

We received a lot of great ideas and whittled the list down to three concepts.
One finalist told us that her students “are always making fun of me looking like I am doing a swim stroke in front of the class” when she tries to model convection! She’d love a new set of heat transfer models!

Another finalist is looking for a model of nutrient runoff into coastal waters and how that stimulates harmful algal bloom production. Concerned about the environment? Show your support for this model!

A model of meiosis and genetic recombination (known as crossing over, when exchanges of chromosome portions occurs) also made it to the top three. If you teach biology or know a student who’s taking Bio, this may be the one for you.

Voting ends on November 30th, so please go to our Facebook page and vote now.

After voting is over, we’ll announce the winner and get started on building the model. And once it’s done, it’ll be available for free to everybody. Win-win all around! If you want to know when it’s available, be sure to like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter and subscribe to our mailing list and RSS feed. We’ll be posting about it through all those channels.

But don’t wait to use our models. Check out our Activity Finder and Classic MW. These free resources contain lots of great examples of the models we already have available for science, math and engineering teachers at all grades. You’re sure to find an activity (or two or three!) that covers other difficult-to-teach concepts. Enjoy!