A thermostat is a controller that maintains a system’s temperature near a fixed point. The simplest thermostat does this by switching a heater or AC on and off to maintain the desired temperature (known as the bang-bang control). I spent a couple of da…
Energy2D is our signature software for heat transfer and fluid dynamics simulations. Written in Java, it runs speedily either as a standalone app on your desktop or an embedded applet within a browser. It is actively being developed to meet the need of…
The Molecular Workbench software has been widely used in middle and high schools. It is relatively unknown that many colleges and universities around the world use it in their classrooms as well.Recently, the software was used in the Summer School in t…
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 […]
Last month, North Carolina’s Senate passed a bill that would have required the state’s Coastal Resources Commission to base predictions of future sea level rise along the state’s coast on a steady, linear rate of increase. This has sparked controversie…
Jesper Haglund from Linköping University presents a poster about our Sweden-US collaborative research on thermal visualization at the 2012 World Conference on Physics Education held in Istanbul, Turkey. Below is the abstract of the poster: “Infrared (IR) thermal imaging is a powerful technology which holds the pedagogical potential of ‘making the invisible visible’, and is […]
Run this simulation. The Kármán vortex street is a repeating pattern of swirling vortices caused by the unsteady separation of flow of a fluid over bluff bodies. It is named after the great scientist Theodore von Kármán who co-founded NASA’s JPL. This effect is observable in nature like in a stream, but you need some […]
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 […]