This is a short description of the ACAT Method.The method uses analogous comparisons by taking examples or situations from everyday life and in consequence the logical or analogous transfer to the scientific problem. The method uses the development of imaginations or “pictures in the head” to develop a view of the analogy; this picture is transferred as a problem-solving idea to the concrete scientific problem. Multimedia material like animations are used to provide a higher level of imagination and to develop the understanding for the discussed problem.

Do you need proof that driving is a dangerous activity? More Americans have died in car crashes over the past 100 years than in all the wars the U.S. has ever fought combined. More than 40,000 Americans die each year on the nation's highways, most as the result of high-speed collisions. In this video segment adapted from NOVA, learn how engineers developed the air bag, an important automobile-safety device now found in most cars.
Recommended for: Grades 3-12

Explore some of the wonders of modern engineering in this video from the Sciencenter in Ithaca, New York. Hear a diverse selection of engineers explain how things work.

Fest 2011 in Half Moon Bay. This conference was help in December 2011 and hosted by the Institute of Knowledge Management in Education. There were participants form K-12, Higher Ed, educational non-profits, foundations and start-up companies. The keynote speaker was Dr. Sugata Mitra.

This series looks at the Oxford Martin School's academics and how their research is making a difference to our global future. The series will be of interest to people who are concerned about the future for the planet, how civilisation will adapt to emerging problems and issues such as climate change, over population, increased urbanisation of populations and the creation of vaccines to fight against future pandemics. The Oxford Martin School academics explain their various research topics in an accessible and thoughtful way and try to find practical solutions to these issues.

Health technology innovation in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), including countries in Africa, falls far short of meeting the healthcare needs of these settings. The result is a heavy reliance on products and technologies imported from industrialised countries that are often not suited to, or sustainable for, LMICs.

Appropriate healthcare products for LMICs are best developed in these countries, where local knowledge and understanding of needs, context and available resources may be incorporated into designs and implementation plans. The objectives for enabling health technology development in LMICs include: 1) expanding the base of expertise through research training programmes with a problem-solving focus; 2) stimulating new knowledge, approaches and solutions by enabling innovation; and 3) integrating research communities within and across institutions to build critical mass.

The field of biomedical engineering is central to health technology innovation. This book is a response to the need for biomedical engineering capacity in Africa. It is grounded in the African context. It serves as a resource for academics and students in biomedical engineering, for those interested in entering the field in any capacity and for practitioners at every stage of product development. University leaders intent on establishing new biomedical engineering programmes or departments, may draw on the content for guidance on structuring their offerings. The book reaches beyond Africa, as it is relevant to other LMIC settings, and provides insights to guide global health initiatives focused on technology innovation.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"Strategic organizational learning is the heart of any productive activity – it’s the trending form of labor. A new article in Design Management Review illustrates how, over the long run, superior performance relies on superior learning. Specifically, knowledge assets embedded in routines, and effective organizational learning undergird dynamic capabilities, and these in turn help top performers to keep a competitive edge. Today, the leader’s new work is therefore to build knowledge-creative enterprises – enterprises that are extremely good at organizational learning and that buzz with positive energy and innovation. The five-stage consulting cycle for co-creating value (Discover-Design-Develop-Deliver-Decide Impact) presented in the article’s case study, can help. Ultimately, making an organization truly knowledge-creative can be done in many ways, but all of them require rigor resourcefulness, and a positive learning culture. Learn how your organization can learn too. Tkaczyk B. 2015..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

What is Business Model Innovation? This video describes the process in which an organization adjusts its business model.

Students learn about power generation using river currents. A white paper is a focused analysis often used to describe how a technology solves a problem. In this literacy activity, students write a simplified version of a white paper on an alternative electrical power generation technology. In the process, they develop their critical thinking skills and become aware of the challenge and promise of technological innovation that engineers help to make possible. This activity is geared towards fifth grade and older students and computer capabilities are required. Some portions of the activity may be appropriate with younger students. CAPTION: Upper Left: Trey Taylor, President of Verdant Power, talks about green power with a New York City sixth-grade class. Lower Left: Verdant Power logo. Center: Verdant Power's turbine evaluation vessel in New York's East River. In the background is a conventional power plant. Upper Right: The propeller-like turbine can be raised and lowered from the platform of the turbine evaluation vessel. Lower Right: Near the East River, Mr. Taylor explains to the class how water currents can generate electric power.

Diffusion of Innovations theory (Rogers, 2003) states that potential adopters moving through the innovation-decision process consider the innovation’s relative advantage, compatibility, complexity, trialability and observability. Rogers (2003) claimed that an individual's perception of these characteristics, or attributes, had a direct impact on whether and to what degree an innovation is adopted and diffused throughout an organization or system. The purpose of this presentation is to share, through the lens of Diffusion of Innovations theory, how members of the Online Consortium of Oklahoma supported the adoption and diffusion of the use of an online publishing platform intended to support consortial-wide adoption, modification, and creation of OER. The 25 member institutions of Online Consortium of Oklahoma (OCO) include two-year institutions, four-year institutions, technical institutes, and doctoral degree granting institutions. As a result, OCO’s strategic vision takes into consideration a broad range of needs, interests, and goals. As members of the OER subcommittee envisioned how to promote use of the publishing platform to each of their institutions, it became apparent that one simple on-boarding process for use across all institutions was ineffective. Faculty introduced to the platform would express interest but those who took additional steps to learn more about its use seemed to be those who had the opportunity to observe use of the platform by a respected peer or colleague with whom they were personally acquainted. Additionally, the group noticed faculty initially resistant to using the platform became enthusiastic about its use once given access to its full capacity. In this lightning talk, representatives from OCO member institutions will describe how they intentionally addressed observability and trialability to support the adoption and diffusion of the publishing platform and statewide use of OER.

Climate Warriors is a space dedicated to combating scientific misinformation to build a healthy information system through different initiatives. The most notable is the publication of REAs. The resources, which include multimedia reports, comics and videos, among others, seek to promote critical thinking about sustainability and climate action (RD Spain 822/2021) as well as Goals 11, 12 and 13. They have been developed by students from different university degrees, assigned to the field of Communication and Education.The initiative has been developed by the Ciberimaginario Group of the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, and participates in the Educational Innovation Project "Open Knowledge Environments Ecosystem (ECO2), of the II Call for Educational Innovation Projects of the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, developed by the Teaching Innovation Group - COMTEDEA

The subject of this course is the historical process by which the meaning of "technology" has been constructed. Although the word itself is traceable to the ancient Greek root teckhne (meaning art), it did not enter the English language until the 17th century, and did not acquire its current meaning until after World War I. The aim of the course, then, is to explore various sectors of industrializing 19th and 20th century Western society and culture with a view to explaining and assessing the emergence of technology as a pivotal word (and concept) in contemporary (especially Anglo-American) thought and expression.
Note: In the interests of freshness and topicality we regard the STS.464 syllabus as sufficiently flexible to permit some — mostly minor — variations from year to year. One example of a different STS.464 syllabus can be found in STS.464 Technology and the Literary Imagination, Spring 2008.

D3: DYNAMIC DETROIT DATA@ BUNCHE ACADEMY IS A RESOURCE FOR STUDENTS, PARENTS AND TEACHERS TO USE TO FIND CURRICULUM RELATED WEBSITES. THIS IS A USEFUL ONE STOP LOCATION TO START YOUR SEARCH TO RELATED AGE APPROPRIATE CONTENT MATERIAL FOR STUDENT WORK.

In the trilogy of D-Lab courses, D-Lab: Dissemination focuses on disseminating innovations among underserved communities, especially in developing countries. Students acquire skills related to building partnerships and piloting, financing, implementing, and scaling-up a selected innovation for the common good. The course is structured around MIT and outside competitions. Teams develop an idea, project or (social) business plan that is "ready to roll" by term's end. Course includes an on-line forum discussion board, student-led case studies and a final proposal or business plan for realizing your dream innovation.

D-Lab Health provides a multidisciplinary approach to global health technology design via guest lectures and a major project based on fieldwork. We will explore the current state of global health challenges and learn how to design medical technologies that address those problems. Students may travel to Nicaragua during spring break to work with health professionals, using medical technology design kits to gain field experience for their device challenge. As a final class deliverable, you will create a product design solution to address challenges observed in the field. The resulting designs are prototyped in the summer for continued evaluation and testing.

This introductory course will provide you with a multidisciplinary approach to managing waste in low- and middle-income countries, with strategies that diminish greenhouse gas emissions and provide enterprise opportunities for marginalized populations. You will focus on understanding some of the multiple dimensions of waste generation and management. Topics are presented in real contexts through case studies, field visits, civic engagement and research, and include consumer culture, waste streams, waste management, entrepreneurship and innovation on waste, technology evaluation, downcycling / upcycling, Life Cycle Analysis and waste assessment. Labs include building low-cost, small scale technology, field trips to waste-related institutions and businesses, art workshops and e-waste scrapping taught by practitioners, artists and waste enthusiasts.

Although there is clear potential to improve science and innovation systems through big data and open science, barriers still remain with respect to data sharing efforts. How can the available massive and diverse data collections be used and shared more efficiently to boost global research and innovation and improve care? What actions are needed to facilitate open access to research data generated with public funding?

The OECD is bringing together policy makers, funding agencies and researchers to tackle the issue of open access to data, focused around developing good practice and principles on data governance. Four case studies highlight best practice and identify barriers to progress.

Following an OECD-hosted consultation with the Ontario Brain Institute (OBI), the United Kingdom Medical Research Council (MRC), and the US Alzheimer’s Association, two concrete examples of global data sharing have been created. The first, focused on providing a wealth of open-source biomedical data for the community (deep data), builds upon GAAIN, the Global Alzheimer’s Association Interactive Network, and links eleven international partners through a federated network of data resources. The capability of this network is being extended significantly through connections with the French National Alzheimer’s Database (BNA), the European Medicines Informatics Framework (EMIF), and the Canadian based Longitudinal Online Research and Imaging System (LORIS). The second focused on linking big data approaches at the population level (broad data), is a complementary collaboration between the Canadian Consortium on Neurodegeneration in Ageing and the Dementias Platform UK to share and analyse large-scale complex population-wide datasets from up to 2 million individuals, including imaging, genomics and health data.

As a result, these collaborations will enable the aggregation of an unprecedented volume of individual and population-level data, offering an open science solution to help research to more efficiently tackle Alzheimer’s disease and related disorders.

Students discover how engineers can use biomimicry to enhance their designs. They learn how careful observation of nature becoming a nature detective, so to speak can lead to new innovations and products. In this activity, students reverse engineer a flower to glean design ideas for new products.

In this video segment from Cyberchase, the CyberSquad designs an invention that will help them cross a swamp and also reach the top of a tall cliff.

This class surveys developmental entrepreneurship via case examples of both successful and failed businesses and generally grapples with deploying and diffusing products and services through entrepreneurial action. By drawing on live and historical cases, especially from South Asia, Africa, Latin America as well as Eastern Europe, China, and other developing regions, we seek to cover the broad spectrum of challenges and opportunities facing developmental entrepreneurs. Finally, we explore a range of established and emerging business models as well as new business opportunities enabled by developmental technologies developed in MIT labs and beyond.