From its beginning, we at the Concord Consortium have advocated for the notion that young people can produce high-quality, meaningful data to answer real questions. More than 20 years ago, Concord Consortium founder Robert Tinker sketched a compelling vision for authentic science in schools and communities, making the case that anyone can be a scientist. […]
Find out how high school students can design and evaluate efficient and affordable solar power systems—even for their own school—in the November/December 2018 issue of The Science Teacher. Co-authored by Concord Consortium researchers Jie Chao, Charles Xie, and Corey Schimpf, with education consultants Joyce Massicotte and Jeff Lockwood, and Stoughton High School science teacher Craig Beaulieu, […]
Four students head to the local park to play cards or Bananagrams on their lunch break. For the rest of the day, they sit quietly around a circular table in our Concord, Massachusetts, office, their computers practically touching around the tight space. Some with ear buds in, they are all focused intently on their screens, […]
During the 2010 FIFA World Cup eight years ago, a common octopus named Paul the Octopus gained worldwide attention because it accurately “predicted” all the results of the most important soccer matches in the world (sadly it died by natural courses …
Fig. 1: Integrated design and simulation in Energy3DIn workplaces, engineering design is supported by contemporary computer-aided design (CAD) tools capable of virtual prototyping — a full-cycle process to explore the structure, function, and cost of a…
In June 10-12, we hosted a successful teacher professional development workshop in York, Maine for 29 teachers from seven states. The theme was around the application of artificial intelligence (AI) in engineering education to assist teaching and fo…
In a sense, design is about choosing parameters. All the parameters available for adjustment form the basis of the multi-dimensional solution space. The ranges within which the parameters are allowed to change, often due to constraints, sets the vo…
Everyone loves to maximize the return of investment (ROI). If you can effortlessly find a solution that pays a higher profit — even only a few dollars more handsomely, why not? The problem is that, in many complicated engineering cases in the real …
The National Science Foundation issued a statement on May 10, 2018 in which the agency envisions that “The effects of AI will be profound. To stay competitive, all companies will, to some extent, have to become AI companies. We are striving to create A…
The Crescent Dues Solar Tower as modeled in Energy3DA light field visualization in Energy3DA top viewThe Crescent Dunes Solar Power Tower is a 110 MW utility-scale concentrated solar power (CSP) plant with 1.1 GWh of molten salt energy storage, located…