Collaborative tinkering

Meriam-Webster defines tinkering as:
"to repair, adjust, or work with something in an unskilled or experimental manner"

Its what one of my younger brothers did during high school on the long summer afternoons when the rest of us took a nap. He pulled out all the broken old things like radios, etc and took them apart and tried to put them back together.

SimInsights is making simulation tools that enable virtual tinkering in collaboration with your friends. You can tinker with a model of a machine or circuit, then send a link to your friend so he or she can tinker with it. With tinkering comes experience which eventually helps build intuition and insights. Those insights differentiate a great scientist or engineer from a good one. Companies all around the world are tinkering with simulation tools to design better products in less time and with less money. Why shouldn't young people do the same?

Collaborative simulations in the browser: No installs, no plugins.

This post is inspired by a conversation I just had with an applicant. Even after visiting SimInsights website, he asked me if there really was no download-install required for using SimInsights software. Its striking how people are resigned to having to go through cumbersome processes to run a simulation.

Although web based simulations have been possible for many years, they have used flash or java plugins which have many issues. Most commonly, however, simulations have been done on the expensive desktops, using software products that can cost as much as $100,000 per user. This is rapidly changing, thanks to several technological advances. It is now possible to run very interesting simulations on your iphone, ipad, pc, mac or any other machine, by just logging into your SimInsights account. Visit www.siminsights.com to experience this flexibility. Just login using your gmail or yahoo account and get started building and sharing your simulations of electrical and mechanical simulations.

Designing group work: Strategies for the heterogeneous classroom

Thanks to Ajoy Vase, math teacher at Ouchi High School in Los Angeles, California, and graduate of Stanford STEP program for suggesting this wonderful book by Professor Elizabeth Cohen: Designing Groupwork: Strategies for the heterogeneous classroom.

The book is full of insights from social science research that inform the design of collaborative learning activities. One of the best blueprints for collaborative learning task design that I know of. Please share other books on the topic that you like.

There are many many insightful sentences that I want to share from this book. Here is one:

"The major advantage of combining a manipulative task with a group setting is that Geraldo has a number of helpful resources, including concrete materials to represent abstract ideas and other people engaged in the same task." (page 8)

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in collaborative learning.

Excellent collection of simulations for teaching dynamics and controls

Thanks to Dr. Shivakumar I. Ranganathan of American University of Sharjah for pointing me to an excellent collection of java simulations for teaching dynamics and controls. See below a screenshot for a double pendulum simulation:

Click here for other models. You will need to install the Java plugin.

Rich assessments using simulations

Would it be useful to include an interactive simulation as part of an assessment of force and motion concepts?

Before you answer this question, take this survey and experience the difference. Here is a screenshot showing one of the questions:

Just in case any of the models looks empty, please move the mouse pointer inside the window to refresh. Note that if you are using a mac, you will only be able to see the first model and not the remaining two because of a known issue on mac for models with images.