SimInsights integrated with Facebook

We are excited to announce the integration of Facebook with SimInsights. Please see attached a few slides for how it works.

 Facebook integration will add names, faces and a lot of warmth to our site which will help build a community. It should lead to new connections being formed among users, more lively interactions and richer discussions. 

 

Please take a minute to log in to www.siminsights.com using your facebook account. You can also login using your google or yahoo accounts. Just click on "My Sims" link on the top gray bar, select "Settings" menu item and link to your facebook accounts at the bottom of the page.

 We look forward to seeing your pictures on your portfolios!

New design for SimInsights website

Have you seen the new design of our website? What did you think?

The new design puts user created simulations front and center on the home page. The moment you land on our site, you are invited to run a simulation, generate charts, look at the numbers update, change simulation settings and re-run. You can then choose from several recent models created by our community. Scroll down to see the latest news through twitter feeds. And finally, a scrolling stream of our user quotes tells you why our users love us.

I feel that having simulations on the home page celebrates the creativity of our community. It also highlights the uniqueness of our platform as the first site that adds simulation to the various forms of expressions available on the web such as text, image, audio and video. But perhaps most importantly, it takes the fear out of simulation.

Having spent nearly 10 years in the engineering simulation industry, I know that poor usability has made a lot of grown-up people dread simulations. If the adults are so fearful, what chance do students have with this technology?

Well, our goal is to simplify simulation and harness its power to serve the user rather than terrify him. Our mission is to make our simulation tools so simple that anyone- no matter what the age, gender of education level- can have his or her first simulation running in less than a minute after landing on our site.

We are just getting started. So let us know what you think about whether we are off to a good start and how we can do a better job. Thanks for reading.

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.

THE PHYSICS OF A TRAMPOLINE ARTIST

The following simulation was developed by Professor Arun Srinivasa of Texas A&M University. 

See below the simulation is of a tampoline artist suspended in the air. The purple arrow is the force of gravity on the man. when you press the run button(The blue triangle on the right hand side of the simulation), he will fall down and begin bouncing from the hard floor. 

BEFORE YOU PRESS THE RUN BUTTON

Answer the following question

Q1: Notice that the man starts out at a height of 6 units from the ground. Do you think that when he bounces, he will

(a) go higher than 6 units?

(b) lower than 6 units?

(c) will jump back exactly six units?

Q2: Which way will his velocity point when he is falling? up or down?

Q3: Which way will his velocity point when he is bouncing up?

Q4: What about his acceleration vector?

NOW RUN THE SIMULATION (pausing or rerunning) :

Watch his velocity vector (green arrow) and acceleration vectors ( black arrow)

Q5: Did he do what you expected? what did you not anticipate? 

Q6: Does he bounce back to the same height every time?

Q7: Give a physical rationalization as to why he doesnt bounce back every time.

Q8: What is the correlation between how fast he tumbles and how high he jumps

Q9: Now give a better answer than Q4 (hint : consider the total energy)

Q10: Why does this man not jump higher that his initial height? how is that possible for a human to jump higher and higher each time? (hint: can this trampoline man do work?)

A simulation built for a Physics textbook problem

Basic motion concepts can be difficult to understand for some students. Following is a video from People's Physics Book by James Dann:

Here is a simulation we made, in just a few minutes, to simulate this scenario:



The simulation allows students to engage with the concepts in a hands on manner. They can click the "Charts" button at the bottom left to see how the velocity, acceleration and other variables change with time. Students can also see the numbers updating as the simulation progresses. First click on the arrow icon at the top and select one of the cars. Then click on the "Data" button at the bottom left. Finally, the "Settings" button allows control of which signals are charted, copy/paste access to chart data and even comparison with analytical expressions to check the accuracy of simulation results.

Its important to note that creating and publishing this simulation to this blog took only a couple of minutes. It was done in the web-browser without any software download or installation. Just login to www.siminsights.com and start creating and sharing your simulations.

Empowering STEM teachers with embeddable web-simulation authoring

As a physics or engineering teacher at high school or college level, do you have ideas for how to engage students through interesting simulations? Do you find that available simulations do not effectively meet  the needs of your students? Do you wish you could whip-up a few simulations quickly to address just the specific needs of your students?

If you answered yes to any of the questions above then take a look at SimInsights apps. In less than a minute, you will have your first simulation running, without writing any code, and without installing any software. You will then be able to customize how students interact with your simulation and finally publish to the web. And thats not all. Your simulations will work with touch input on ipad, can be embedded in other pages such as blogs, online quizzes, wiki pages and even e-books.

By empowering teachers to easily and flexibly create and publish simulation based learning content, we are making STEM learning more meaningful and fun. In the coming weeks, you will see announcements about a few pioneering teachers publishing interesting simulation based learning content. We look forward to your comments.

A new streamlined embeddable simulator

Today we are releasing a new streamlined design for our embeddable simulator (player).



Click the play button at the top to start the simulation. Then try out the Chart and Settings buttons at the bottom.

Just like embeddable video and slideshow players, the web needs embeddable simulators that facilitate meaningful discussions and stimulate thought. SimInsights is filling this void by providing simulators for mechanical systems and electrical circuits. Here is how it works. You log in to www.siminsights.com, free of charge, to build your simulation and then make it public. You can then copy the embed code and paste into blogs, wiki pages, online quizzes, e-books and other places.

Here are three examples of how the embeddable simulator can be used:

1. Blogs: As part of a blog post (see above), simulations can promote deeper discussions about physics and engineering. 
2. E-books: Embedded in e-books such as flexbooks by CK12, they can help students learn concepts through hands-on interaction. 
3. Assessments: When embedded in online quizzes, the simulations can assess student understanding in rich ways that go well beyond multiple choice questions.

Whether your audience is using smartphones or iPad or PC or Mac, the SimInsights embeddable simulator makes your simulations universally accessible, so that the maximum number of people worldwide can benefit from it. Log in to siminsights.com and try it out.

A simulation for motion concepts

Following is a simulation for problem #5 in CK12 People's Physics Book by James H. Dann. It is an essential problem, with the graphs of the motion (both v vs. t and x vs. t) being especially hard for the students.

Click the strobe icon (one that looks like an orange movie camera) and select one of the cars to see snapshots through time.

SimInsights adds touch input to web-based collaborative simulations

Now you can build SimMotion models on the iPad using touch! Just touch the screen to create a particle, or drag your finger to define a rectangular body. To connect bodies with springs, dampers etc., simply touch a particle and drag your finger to the next particle. Simulations have never been so easy and fun. We hope you will enjoy the addition of touch input to web-based collaborative simulations. Let us know what you think.

 

Matthew Peterson on interactive software designed for math learning

Excellent talk by Matt Peterson, founder of Mind Research, on how current teaching is flawed in its extreme emphasis on the use of words when clearly words do not work for most students.

Matt says: "...instead of just throwing a bunch of words at students, we create rich opportunities for them to create their own dots in their own heads, about how math works. And when students play an active role in figuring out how math works, they want to talk about it. It sparks mathematical talk. In this way, a language free approach can improve language skills."