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Beyond Google SketchUp
Google SketchUp is a wonderful program that you can use to design 3D structures such as a building WYSIWYG-ly. It offers by far the most advanced user interface for creating 3D objects. Within ten...
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Energy3D: Design, print, cut, assemble, and test
Figure 1: Designing a building withEnergy3D.We have come close to release an alpha version of Energy3D, a computational building science laboratory for simulating energy flow and designing energy...
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A virtual heliodon from Energy3D
The virtual heliodon of Energy3Din action.According to Wikipedia, "a heliodon is a device for adjusting the angle between a flat surface and a beam of light to match the angle between a horizontal...
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Design your own house with Energy3D
Energy3D is a free, open-source tool we are developing from scratch to empower students to design, make, and test energy-efficient model houses.Today we had some students design and make their own...
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Students enjoyed Energy3D in Engineering Energy Efficiency Summer School 2011
Click to enlarge This week 11 students of different ages (10-17) participated in our three-day summer school for the Engineering Energy Efficiency project. They were charged with using Energy3D to...
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Designing solar hot air collectors
Engineering design is a lot of fun. The variety of engineering systems students can realistically design and build in classrooms is, however, limited by the constraints of time, resources, and student...
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"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...
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Sketch up a village using Energy3D
Energy3D is our signature software program for designing and making buildings. It actually can be used to sketch up a street or a village. The three images in this post show this capacity.With the...
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Energy3D Version 1.0 released!
Looking for free tools to teach engineering design in K-12 classrooms? We are pleased to announce that Energy3D Version 1.0 is now available for free download at http://energy.concord.org/energy3d....
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Detecting students’"brain waves" during engineering design using a CAD tool
Design a city block with Energy3D.We were in a school these two weeks doing a project that aims to understand how students learn engineering design. This has been a difficult research topic as...
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Significant gender differences found (confirmed?) in CAD research
A student designIn a pilot study conducted in December 2012, high school students in an engineering class used our Energy3D CAD tool to do an urban solar design project -- they must consider the sun...
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Energy3D Version 2.0 released
We are proud to release Energy3D version 2.0, available for download from our website. Energy3D is a computer-aided design and fabrication tool for making small model green buildings. This version...
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Solar heating simulations in Energy3D
We are adding some new features to our Energy3D software that will allow the user to carry out passive solar design of one or multiple buildings (or even an entire city block). These new features will...
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Solar urban design using Energy3D: Part I
In sustainable architecture, passive solar design refers to searching for optimal strategies to maximize solar heating on a building in the winter and minimize solar heating in the summer in order to...
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Solar urban design using Energy3D: Part II
The sun is lower in the winter and higher in the summer. How does the sun path affect the solar radiation on the city block in our urban design challenge? Is solar heating different in different...
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Solar urban design using Energy3D: Part III
In Part I and II, we discussed how solar simulations in Energy3D can be used to decide where to erect a new building in a city block surrounded by existing buildings. Now, what about putting multiple...
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Solar urban design using Energy3D: Part IV
In Part I, II, and III, we mainly explored the possible layouts of buildings in the city block and their solar energy outputs in different seasons. In those cases, the solar radiation on a new...
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Solar urban design and data mining in the classroom
Image usage permitted by students.Image usage permitted by students.In the past two weeks, seventy ninth graders in three physics classes of Arlington High School (MA) each used our Energy3D CAD...
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Fair asessment for engineering design?
The student's design #1In our June study on engineering design in a high school, one student's designs caught my eye. The design challenge required students to use Energy3D to design a cluster of...
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Measuring the effects of an intervention using computational process analytics
"At its core, scientific inquiry is the same in all fields. Scientific research, whether in education, physics, anthropology, molecular biology, or economics, is a continual process of rigorous...
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