Blog

Open invitation to software developers

Our Common Online Data Analysis Platform (CODAP) offers easy-to-use web-based software that makes it possible for students in grades 6 through college to visualize, analyze, and ultimately learn from data. Whether the source of data is a game, a map, an experiment, or a simulation, CODAP provides an immersive, exploratory experience with dynamically linked data […]

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Tablet-friendly STEM Resources

Is your New Year’s resolution to find more interactive STEM resources that are tablet-ready? (We understand — we make similar technology-related resolutions, too!) We’ve optimized many of our browser-based interactive resources to run on popular tablets. By tuning our code, we’re able to make the power of our models available for your students! For example, […]

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Modeling Physical Behavior with an Atomic Engine

Our Next-Generation Molecular Workbench (MW) software usually models molecular dynamics—from states of matter and phase changes to diffusion and gas laws. Recently, we adapted the Molecular Dynamics 2D engine to model macroscale physics mechanics as well, including pendulums and springs. In order to scale up the models from microscopic to macroscopic, we employ specific unit-scaling […]

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Hitting the Wall

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 […]

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A Datasheet for NextGen MW

The opposite of Thomas Dolby I was terrible at the first four weeks of organic chemistry. I just couldn’t get the right pictures into my head. The depictions of the chemical reaction mechanisms I was supposed to memorize seemed like just so many Cs (and Hs and Os and, alarmingly, Fs) laid out randomly as […]

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Video: Molecular Workbench Brings Science to Life in the Browser

As we make our award-winning Molecular Workbench software more accessible and widely available, we’re documenting our story at the same time. Google’s grant to the Concord Consortium funds the conversion of MW from Java to HTML5 so it will run in modern Web browsers. This will reduce barriers for using the next generation MW in schools. Students will be able […]

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iPad2 HTML5 stats look good

Sencha has the latest on the new iPad’s HTML5 performance, and the verdict looks quite good: The iPad 2’s Mobile Safari browser is the best implementation of WebKit on a mobile device. In our testing we tried to throw everything we could at the browser and it had no issues keeping up with the most […]

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