Energy3D in France and Energy3D User's Guide

Solar irradiation simulations of urban clusters in Energy3D.

More than four years ago, I blogged about our ideas to develop a computer-aided design (CAD) program for education that is different from SketchUp. We wanted a CAD program that allows students to easily and quickly perform physical analyses to test the functions of their 3D models while constructing them -- in contrast to typical industry practices that involve pre-processing, numerical simulation, and then post-processing. We thought closing the gap between construction and analysis is fundamentally important because students need instantaneous feedback from some authentic scientific computation to guide their next design steps. Without such a feedback loop, students will not be able to know whether their computer designs will function or not -- in the way permitted by science, even if they can design the forms well.

Four years after Saeid Nourian and I started to develop our Energy3D CAD program, we received the following comment from Sébastien Canet, a teacher from Académie de Nantes:

"I am a French STEM teacher and a trainer of technical education teachers in west France. Our teachers loved your software! We were working on an 'eco-quartier' with the goal to use as much passive solar energy as possible. Each student worked with SketchUp to model his/her house and then pasted the model on a map. Then we tested different solar orientations. Your software is a really good complementary tool to SketchUp, though the purposes are not the same. It is fast, easy to use, and perfect for constructing!!! I will use it instead of SketchUp in our activities."

Sébastien wrote that, if we can provide a French version, there would be hundreds of French STEM teachers who will adopt our software through his Académie. We are really happy to know that people have started to compare Energy3D with SketchUp and are even considering using Energy3D instead of SketchUp. This might be a small change to those users who make the switch but it is a big thing to us.

On  a separate note, we just finished the initial version of the User's Guide for Energy3D. We intend this to eventually grow into a book that will be useful to teachers who must, upon the requirement of the Next Generation Science Standards, teach some engineering design in K-12 schools. Our recent experiences working with high school teachers in Massachusetts show the lack of practical engineering materials tailor-made for high school students. As a result, one of the teachers with whom we are collaborating has to use a college textbook on architectural engineering. Perhaps we can provide a book that will fill this gap -- with a student-friendly CAD program to support it.