Category: Tag: molecular-workbench
Just got back from the Biennial Conference on Chemical Education (BCCE 2012), where I participated in a symposium titled “Web-Based Resources for Chemical Education.” About 60 people attended to learn about Molecular Workbench and other online tools and resources. One of the audience questions was about future availability of Molecular Workbench on the iPad and other tablets. […]
We’re in the midst of a remarkable transition in education – a change that will give teachers more flexibility in the resources they use in their classroom. The growing role of digital textbooks is gaining momentum. Major publishers are not just converting their textbooks to digital format, they’re also reconceptualizing them, adding a more diverse […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
As we make our award-winning Molecular Workbench software more accessible and widely available, we’re documenting our story at the same time. Google’s grant to the Concord Consortium funds the conversion of MW from Java to HTML5 so it will run in modern Web browsers. This will reduce barriers for using the next generation MW in schools. Students will be able […]