Simple Apps → Rapid "What If?" Explorations 

nanoHUB brings powerful simulation and modeling tools to educators and students via easy-to-use Apps. We handle all the computational aspects of the simulations so users can focus on learning. Setting up and running a simulation in nanoHUB requires only a few clicks, so students can ask What if? questions. Powerful visualization helps them develop intuition and understand difficult concepts.

Faculty Adopting nanoHUB for Use in Structured Education

From anecdotal evidence, the nanoHUB team had learned that faculty are adopting nanoHUB Apps for teaching in their structured university programs all over the globe. 

To go beyond anecdotes, we began to analyze user behavior and clustered similar user behaviors in similar locations [1].   Using such clustering analysis, we have identified 57,500+ students in 2,897 classes at over 180 institutions.  These numbers include the early beginnings of nanoHUB, from the year 2000 until the end of 2019. 

Example of different classroom clusters.  The horizontal coordinates correspond to days, the vertical coordinate stacks different users with similar behaviors.

From Research to Education in 6 Months

nanoHUB tools and their updated versions are assigned unique Digital Object Identifies (DOIs) which include a specific publication date.   We have measured the time from first tool publication to first-time adoption in a classroom and published the results in Nature Nanotechnology [2].   In 2013 we had measured a median adoption time of fewer than 6 months. Faculty within and outside of our immediate network are innovating their curriculum very rapidly compared to a typical textbook update that requires some 4 years. 

(left) Time from Digital Object Identifier (DOI) publication date to first-time use in structured education. (right) Histogram of App/Tool Adoption times. (Data from 2012).

[1] Michael Zentner, Nathan Denny, Krishna Madhavan, Swaroop Samek, George Adams III., Gerhard Klimeck, "Using Automatic Detection and Characterization to Measure Educational Impact of nanoHUB", Proceedings of the 13th Gateway Computing Environments Conference, September 25-27, 2018, Austin, TX, paper

[2] Krishna Madhavan, Michael Zentner, Gerhard Klimeck, "Learning and research in the cloud", Published online 07 November 2013, Nature Nanotechnology 8, 786–789 (2013); doi:10.1038/nnano.2013.231, nature.com paper