The Idea Mill

Idea of the virtual rolling mill laboratory

Laboratory tests are crucial in education and training of engineers. Experimental equipment and process simulators are extremely expensive. It is not possible and justified economically to build such laboratories, for educational purposes, in large number of schools. On the other hand, education and training based on video films, etc., is not adequate and personal contact of students with a pro...

Idea Generation and the Quality of the Best Idea

I a wide variety of settings, organizations generate a number of possible solutions to a problem—ideas—and then select a few for further development. We examine the effectiveness of two group structures for such tasks—the team structure, in which the group works together in time and space, and the hybrid structure, in which individuals first work independently and then work together. We define ...

The Idea in Brief The Idea in Practice

Gristle for the mill

There’s an old saying in Washington DC — making laws is like making sausage; you’re better off not knowing the details. Well, that same spirit often applies to the coverage of science news. The focus is on the succulent final product rather than the process required to get there. But science journalists have found the need to take a break from that approach with one big biology story: the tale ...

What's the big idea? Toward a pedagogy of idea power

A key to understanding why School is what it is lies in recognizing a systematic tendency to deform ideas in specific ways in order to make them fit into a pedagogical framework. One of these deformations is described here as " disempowering ideas. " The insight leads to a new direction for innovation in education: re-empowering the disempowered ideas. Doing so is not easy: it needs a new epist...