"Heart"-shape house? "Seastar"-shape house?

In just a few hours, two students were capable of designing ten houses using our Energy3D software, about which they had no prior experience at all. Among them there is one with a floor plan of the shape of a heart and another the shape of a sea star.

We were excited about the ease of use of Energy3D for designing complex houses. However, there are a few concerns. First, these two houses have complicated shapes that take a long time to scale up on cardstock and assemble from the cutout pieces. With a powerful CAD tool like this, students' creativity can be unleashed--they are capable of coming up with sophisticated designs. But computer models are not the final destinations. They are thinking and visualization tools that help students conceptualize their designs. Our goal in engineering projects is to have them make real systems after computer models. If a computer model is too complex, students may not be able to make the real system within a given amount of time in the classroom. On the other hand, if a computer model is inflexible and few variations are feasible, students will quickly be bored. It may be a bad idea to limit the design capacity to simple models with only a handful of features and options. So where is the balance point?

Another thing we should watch out is that students who are too focused on designing the fancy shapes like these may pay less attention to the science and engineering principles we hope to teach in this engineering design challenge--we want them to think about designs that can achieve maximum livability and be energy-efficient. What kind of intelligence can we build into our CAD tool to provide just-in-time instructions that guide their designs?

Swedish newspaper reported IR research with pupils

Swedish newspaper Norrköpings Tidningar reported today our international collaboration with Konrad Schönborn and Jesper Haglund at Linköping University on educational research that is aimed at uncovering the cognitive power of IR imaging for science education. If you don't understand Swedish, the title translates into “The heat camera can become important in school physics.” Jenny Sajjadi, a teacher in math and physics, was quoted as saying: “Physics is seen as an ‘old’ subject and this is a bit of new thinking that can increase the students’ interest. For me as a teacher, it is an entrance to deeper teaching.”

Modern handheld IR cameras deliver tremendous power equivalent to thousands of temperature sensors. This kind of Very Large Scale Integrated Sensing System (VLSISS, my coinage in parallel to VLSI circuits that have revolutionized computing) is about to change the landscape of scientific inquiry in the classroom. It opens up learning opportunities that have never been seen before. This US-Sweden collaboration will advance this agenda. As the first step, the collaborative project will provide some pivotal data for how augmented visualization (to the sense of touch) could be a good intervention to notoriously hardy misconceptions related to heat and temperature. See my earlier blog post about this.

An online gas lab simulation

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You probably know the Ideal Gas Law well. An ideal gas is a hypothetical gas made of randomly moving particles that do not have a volume and do not interact with one another. Have your students ever asked questions such as "What about non-ideal gases? How good is the Ideal Gas Law for real gases?" I don't know about other people's experience, but I myself was intrigued by those questions when I learned the gas laws. Unfortunately, I couldn't go too deeply in trying to answer them because just thinking about the complexity of the motion and interaction quickly intimidated me.

Before computer simulation was widely accessible, you probably would have to pull out the Van der Waals Equation and pray that doing the math would do the trick.

Now, there is a good way to teach this. Using an online molecular dynamics simulation--made using the Molecular Workbench software, investigating non-ideal gases is a piece of cake. This simulation uses a pair of gas containers side by side and allows the user to explore how six variables affect the volume of  a gas: temperature, pressure, number of particles, particle mass, particle size, and particle attraction. It basically covers all the variables in the Van der Waals equation--without saying them explicitly. And there is a variable that is not included in the Van der Waals equation. The simulation reveals exactly why it is not there.

An online simulation for studying states of matter

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Have you wondered why some light elements form solids at room temperature whereas some heavy elements form liquids (e.g., mercury) or gases (e.g., radon) at room temperature? Many people tend to associate "heavy" with "solid." But that is not true.

Using an online 3D molecular dynamics simulation--made using the Molecular Workbench software, you can investigate if or how atomic mass, atomic size, interatomic attraction, and temperature affect the formation of a phase. This investigation allows for deeper exploration about what determines a phase.

Java is required to run this simulation in your browser as an applet.