Simulation as form of expression

The internet provides unlimited opportunities for expression. At SimInsights, we are adding a new medium for expression: simulations. Simulations represent a very powerful amplifier for human understanding, cognition and thought. Just look at the multi-billion dollar simulation software and services industry to get a feel for the impact simulation technology has on our world. Boeing, Toyota, Porsche and practically every company making products and delivering services is leveraging simulations to cut costs and accelerate innovation. However, simulation software available today are very complex. It is a bit like computers in early days- you had to be a scientist to do anything with them. At SimInsights, we look at this as an interesting design and engineering problem to be solved. How can simulation be made so easy and intuitive so that middle school students can have fun doing it? Once it is easy and fun to do simulations, more and more people can begin to use them to amplify their understanding of the world and gain access to greater opportunities. And perhaps simulations can take their place next to other expression forms such as text, images, audio and video.

Performance Assessments: More Building, Less Bubbling

Since my last post, I've been stewing a little on the value that we can add to school districts in this current educational climate. Over the past 10 years or so, there has (rightly) begun to be an intense focus on gathering data on what students really know and where their gaps in comprehension may lie. Our current system of formative and summative assessment is heavily based on periodic benchmark tests and annual, http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifhigh-stakes exams. In the end, it sadly becomes about students filling in the correct bubbles and using test taking strategies like elimination to help them figure out the answers that they know must lie somewhere between the letters A and E on the page. Useful, because they will have to take standardized tests for the rest of their lives. But not so useful when it comes thttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifo assessing how well they might perform when they are asked to build and test a robot or a simple radio in an engineering class. Especially thinking about kids in our underserved neighborhoods, it seems crazy to expect them to make the transition from bubbling to building in a few months between high school and college. Enter SimInsights and the creation of computer based performance assessments.

Here's the lowdown on performance assessment. Basically it's a far superior form of understanding where a learner is in their development, but until now, it's taken a lot of work on the creation and the actual evaluation side to make it something that can be done on a large scale. And speaking of scale, the SCALE group at Stanford School of Education has done some great work in documenting pilot studies of performance assessment. Instead of bubbling in answers, we can actually have students placed in a virtual environment where they have to demonstrate their proficiency with a topic by building a model or testing a hypothesis by creating an experiment and executing it. This type of system could really add value to a student's learning, and at the same time, provide bucketloads of useful data about what that student can actually DO with the information they have learned. Because we want to move towards a system with more building than bubbling.

Siminsights: Access to Physics

When Rajesh first told me about Siminsights, he used words like collaborative simulation, high quality tools, online education, cognitive mentorship, peer based learning, and the like. But I strongly believe that at the end of the day, Siminsights is really about one thing: Access.

To explain what I mean, I'd like to reference my own thought process when I decided to enter the world of education in lieu of a career in finance or consulting. It was a bold move, driven by my heart rather than my head, but I still had a choice to make: was I going to apply for jobs as a Physics teacher or a Math teacher? I picked Math simply because I knew that students have to take three years of math to graduate high school in California, compared to zero years of Physics. This translates to fewer jobs in Physics education, so although I picked up a credential in Physics in addition to the one I had in math, I was marketing myself mainly as a math teacher. Funnily enough, I was hired to teach math and pioneer a physics program at a charter school in LA, but when the recession hit, the budget for the physics lab was the first thing to be struck off the school's to do list. I ended up teaching no Physics that year or the next.

In that microcosmic situation you have the answer to why most kids in public school have no chance of entering careers in engineering or applied physics. More than 60% of high school students in the US have not taken any physics prior to graduating*. When they enter college, and have to compete with students who have had physics, they can quickly become demotivated because they feel that they have too much ground to make up. The gap seems even wider when you compare these students to those from Asian countries, who take 3-5 years of physics before entering college. I wish it were true that one could make up for that lost ground in college, but the truth is, it happens too rarely. So the problem of physics access is directly related to the problem of young people entering STEM fields, which is really important when you consider the need for qualified STEM graduates to be working on problems in alternative energy, information technology and even poverty reduction.

So that's why I believe that a tool like Siminsights is important. It provides Access to a kid who wouldn't otherwise have it. A kid whose parents can't afford to send her to a private school so she can get the preparation she needs to be an engineer. It's like giving that kid access to a textbook, a lab and a community of physics teachers and professionals in one fell swoop. It narrows the resource gap by making powerful quantitative simulation tools available to people for free. Instead of waiting until college to expose kids to quantitative tools like Matlab, Maple and Mathematica, by which point most of them have lost the will to take math and science, Siminsights provides a fun community-based on ramp to simulation based learning. Instead of costing school districts thousands of dollars in textbook fees, it makes physics education open source. Because all (not just some) of us have a right to learn. And we need to encourage as many people to learn about physics as we can possibly manage. Our society depends on it.

*http://www.aip.org/statistics/trends/highlite/hs2/hshigh.pdf

Collaborative circuit simulation in the browser

We have redesigned SimOhm, our web-based collaborative circuit simulation tool. Feel free to build you own circuit below. Don't worry, go ahead.