For nearly 18 years, our logo has been a beautiful and complex sunflower, created by Senior Web Developer Noah Paessel. (He was Noah Fields back in 1994 when he worked at the Concord Consortium during his first stint with us, but that’s another blog post!) With the former logo, our founder, Bob Tinker, wanted to […]
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 […]
Link to NSTA news NSTA Reports is the National Science Teachers Association’s newspaper published nine times a year as a free member service. In January, our Engineering Energy Efficiency Project was one of the three projects featured in a report about “meaningfully integrating science and engineering.” The Engineering Energy Efficiency Project is funded by the […]
A house designed using our Energy3D CAD software. Perhaps the most important change in the Next Generation Science Standards to be released in March 2013 is the elevation of engineering design to the same level of importance as of scientific inquiry (which was enshrined as a doctrine of science education in the 1996 science standards). […]
Design a city block with Energy3D.We were in a school these two weeks doing a project that aims to understand how students learn engineering design. This has been a difficult research topic as engineering design is an extremely complicated cognitive pr…
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 […]
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 […]
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…