Maroon vs Molecular Workbench

Maroon is a free, open-source immersive physics laboratory for interactive learning, simulations, and experiments. In its virtual environment, users approach a station and teleport to a room containing the related lesson or activity. Simulations emphasize active learning by involving students in the process. Listed physics activities include Coulomb’s Law, Falling Coil, Faraday’s Law, Huygens’ Principle, Point Wave, Pendulum, Van de Graaff, and Optics. The lab also includes titration and sorting experiments, and supports experiment authoring. In the optics activity, users adjust parameters and receive real-time visual feedback while exploring reflection, refraction, lenses, and fiber optics. Maroon runs in a browser and has downloadable Windows PC and virtual-reality versions. Developed with Unity at Graz University of Technology, the project is hosted on GitHub and welcomes contributions, issue reports, and pull requests. Students can contribute functionality, VR experiences, learning experiences, and physics experiments.

Molecular Workbench is a free modeling tool for designing and conducting computational experiments across science. Its interactive learning environment supports science inquiry, while its authoring system lets instructional designers create and publish curriculum based on models and simulations. Users can customize simulations or create their own, with topics spanning gas laws, fluid mechanics, states of matter, chemical reactions, genetics, protein synthesis, and quantum phenomena. Activities can include assessments, student-data collection, learning monitoring, and teacher feedback. Simulations can also be embedded in blogs, wikis, or web pages. The Next-Generation Molecular Workbench brings computational experiments to browsers using HTML5. An offline version is available, but it cannot access the latest simulations or collect student data. Downloads are listed for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, and require Java Runtime Environment 1.5 or later. The maker says the software needs considerable computing power and may start slowly while the Java virtual machine launches. Molecular Workbench is developed and maintained by the Concord Consortium.