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.

A high school student's design work with Energy3D

Cormac Paterson is a student at Arlington High School. We ran into him last year while conducting research in the school. He quickly mastered our Energy3D CAD software. In as short as just five class periods, he came up with three different architectural designs that appear to be very sophisticated and impressive (see the second row in the image). After that, Mr. Paterson continued his creative work with Energy3D. In his latest projects, he designed a Mars colony and a solar tree. Many of his design elements surprised us: As the developers of the CAD software, we didn't even know that it could do those things until we saw his designs!

Thanks to the National Science Foundation, we obtained a bit more funding to deepen our research on engineering design. We are extremely interested in studying Mr. Paterson's gift in architectural design: What makes him such an extraordinary designer as a high school student? Since our Energy3D software can monitor every move of the designer, we may be able to find some clues from the data generated in his design processes.

Note: We are very serious in protecting the privacy of minors. In this case, we have obtained a permission from Mr. Paterson's parent to feature him and his work.

Getting sensor data out of Energy2D

Figure 1: Copy data from Energy2D.

Since a few users asked if the simulation data in Energy2D can be exported to other applications such as Excel, I have added a feature to the app for extracting virtual sensor data as multi-column time series data. For the user's convenience, there are three different ways of getting these data:

1. When right-clicking on a sensor, the "View Data..." from the popup menu returns the data that has been recorded by the selected sensor.
2. When right-clicking on a spot not occupied by a sensor, the "View Data..." from the popup menu returns a tabbed pane that contains all the sensor data -- different types of sensor are organized in different tabs.
3. When the translucent graph is open, clicking the View Data button on the graph window's control panel returns the data recorded by all the sensors of the selected type, in consistent with the current display of the data in the graph window.

Figure 2: Paste data into Excel.

Regardless of which way you use, use the "Copy Data" button at the bottom of the data window to copy the data (Figure 1) and paste it into Excel. Once you get the data into Excel, you can process and plot them in any way you want (Figure 2). This feature is very handy if you need to combine data from multiple simulations into a single graph.

Note: This feature only works for the app. For security reason, the embedded applet is not allowed to access the System Clipboard (this is understandable, because people often copy and paste important information!)