Category: Uncategorized

Today we obtained permission from the Octave team to include Octave in NCLab. For those who do not know (is there anyone?), Octave is a free open source alternative to Matlab. Many students and researchers prefer Octave over Matlab not only for their love to open source software, but mainly because of Matlab’s licensing policy

After a careful evaluation of many pros and cons, today we replaced the “turn” command in Karel the Robot in NCLab with two commands “left” and “right”. The main reason was that in more complicated tasks such as navigating through a maze, the robot was basically only rotating, resembling a small tornado. I already changed

                  Today NCLab was presented to a computer science instructor at Coral Academy (CA) in Reno. CA is an exemplary high school for math, science, and engineering. The instructor liked it a lot and specifically he said that Karel the Robot was much better than Scratch (another

  This is a 3D solid model of the SWE logo created in NCLab. We are very proud to join our forces with the Society of Women Engineers in outreach to K-12 education!

PLaSM (Programming Language of Solid Geometry) is a powerful library for 3D Design. This technology is sometimes also called Constructive Solid Geometry (CSG) and it is part of all modern CAD systems. One can use PLaSM in NCLab to create parts of machines, buildings, and much more. Try it yourself, it is very simple and

Today I created a first tutorial video “NCLab for K-12” that describes what NCLab is and how K-12 teachers can use it in classroom. Since I was in the recording room and I had some time left, I also created a first tutorial video for Karel the Robot. I am not very satisfied with any

                    New tutorial for PLaSM was finished, see http://femhub.com/nclab-tutorials/. PLaSM stands for Programming Language of Solid Modeling, and it allows you to create advanced 3D designs. The language is very simple. For example typing CUBOID([1, 1, 1]) will render a unit cube. There are various other

An introductory course called Meet Your New Graphing Calculator is available on the Tutorial Page. It begins with explaining is simple words what cloud computing is about and what benefits it brings to NCLab users. Then the reader learns how to create an account and log in, the meaning of the desktop icons, how to

NCLab’s Mesh Editor (ME) can be used to generate meshes on geometries created using the GE (or imported in XML). Mesh generation can be done manually (triangles and/or quads) or automatic (only triangles at the moment). Elements can have curved edges and meshes can have variable density in subdomains. Meshes can be passed to the

NCLab’s Geometry Editor (GE) can be used to create 2D geometries for computer models. It has intuitive controls and some nice features such as circular arcs, subdomains, and XML import. Geometries can be passed to Mesh Editor (ME) for manual or automatic mesh generation.