Category: Tag: molecular-workbench
2024 marks our 30th anniversary. Our origins reach back to a simple beginning, on a single-board computer with a mere one kilobyte of memory. But it’s not about the computer itself—it’s never just the technology. It’s what the computer made possible that matters. When Bob Tinker connected a KIM-1 computer to an expansion board he’d […]
“Getting out of the classroom and into the world.” That’s the most exciting thing about education today, explains Andrew Njaa. A philosophy major at a liberal arts college isn’t the most obvious path to teaching physics. But after graduating from St. John’s College in Santa Fe in 1984, a new fellowship collaboration between St. John’s, the University of New Mexico, and Santa Fe Public Schools changed the course of his career plans. Andrew completed an internship learning how to teach and teaching math at Santa Fe Technical High School. He was convinced that he wanted to be in the classroom.
“The most exciting thing about the Next-Generation Molecular Workbench is that it lets us to do more things for more people, more easily.” -Chad Dorsey, CEO & President of the Concord Consortium Have you seen the latest Next-Generation MW interactives? We’ve taken the physics-based interactive simulations and made them better. The Next-Generation Molecular Workbench is […]
One of the key features of our Next-Generation Molecular Workbench is the ability to easily share and embed interactives in blog posts, learning management systems, emails and more—wherever you can paste a weblink or HTML code. Just two simple steps will have you sharing your favorite interactives with all your friends and colleagues in no […]
Our Next-Generation Molecular Workbench (MW) software usually models molecular dynamics—from states of matter and phase changes to diffusion and gas laws. Recently, we adapted the Molecular Dynamics 2D engine to model macroscale physics mechanics as well, including pendulums and springs. In order to scale up the models from microscopic to macroscopic, we employ specific unit-scaling […]
We’re pleased today to welcome a new logo for the Molecular Workbench (MW), our complex, beautiful and award-winning software for visualizing molecular dynamics and more. MW was developed over a decade with funding from the National Science Foundation by senior scientist and software developer Charles Xie. It includes a powerful physics engine that calculates the […]
It was a great year for the Concord Consortium! We won a Smaller Business Association of New England (SBANE) Innovation Award! Next-Generation Molecular Workbench interactives starred in the MIT MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) “Introduction to Solid State Chemistry” through a new collaboration with edX. Chad Dorsey described our vision of deeply digital education at […]
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 […]
At the heart of Molecular Workbench’s modeling of atomic interactions is a profoundly important but fundamentally simple concept: At close distances, atoms attract each other until they get so close that they repel. Here’s a demo of that concept: two atoms interacting. Drag the green atom to various locations near and far from the purple […]