Category: Molecular Workbench
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 […]
About four years ago, I dreamed about how multicore computing could push educational computing into a high-performance era. It turns out that the progress in multicore computing has been slow. The computer I am using to write this blog post has four ph…
Orlando is the center of the thermal imaging universe in November 6-8 when it hosts the largest infrared imaging conference in the world: InfraMation. Invited by FLIR Systems, I gave a Keynote Speech on the educational applications of IR imaging in thi…
I checked our Web log today and the statistics showed that the Molecular Workbench software (Java version) has been downloaded for 1,014,439 times since 2005. This number doesn’t include those instances in which MW is embedded in other software or run …
Figure 1 The most fascinating part of science is the search of answers to strange phenomena. In the past nine months, I have posted more than fifty IR videos on my Infrared YouTube channel. These experiments are all very easy to do, but not all of them are easy to explain. In this blog post, […]
Looking for free tools to teach engineering design in K-12 classrooms? We are pleased to announce that Energy3D Version 1.0 is now available for free download at http://energy.concord.org/energy3d. Energy3D is a computer-aided design and fabrication to…
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 […]
A hypothetical nano sorting machine. The International Journal of Engineering Education published our paper “A Visual Approach to Nanotechnology Education.” The paper presents a systematic approach based on scientific visualization to teaching and learning concepts in nanoscience and nanotechnology. Five types of mathematical models are used to generate visual, interactive simulations that provide a powerful […]
Natural user interfaces (NUIs) are the third generation of user interface for computers, after command line interfaces and graphical user interfaces. A NUI uses natural elements or natural interactions (such as voice or gestures) to control a computer …