Descartes
Engineering Integration
DESCARTES allows more meaningful integration of engineering with applied math and science concepts and facilitates critical thinking, reasoning, and analysis by allowing students to create, analyze, and test hundreds of variations on designs in the time it would take to create one by hand.
Design modules and projects
DESCARTES includes many different design modules for projects involving: Boats, Submersibles, Airships, Gliders, and Rockets. DESCARTES has many project lessons that align with different NGSS and CCSS standards at each grade level and permits the authoring of new custom lessons.
Perfect for elementary students
DESCARTES uses powerful industrial-grade engineering tools behind the scenes but with an easy to use interface perfect for elementary students project-based experiences with engineering-based math and science inquiry.
Seamless addition to your classroom
With the instructional support features that DESCARTES offers, ready-to-use projects and curricula, student performance evaluation, and game-based engagement experiences for students, DESCARTES is a great way to seamlessly add engineering into your math and science classrooms.
Behind the Scenes
The Tools.
The platform is a set of real engineering tools for creating complicated designs; analyzing these designs with math, science, data, and plots; simulating these designs; 3D printing or hand fabricating a prototype, and collecting test data in the real world.
The Teamwork.
Students collaborate, communicate, and discuss their designs in teams and DESCARTES contains tools for sharing design logs, files, and results with team members.
The Curricula.
The platform and supporting curricula have an emphasis on analysis, justification, documentation, practice, and communication of STEM concepts, knowledge, and skills.
“Descartes is integrated STEM. It’s science, math, and engineering working as the glue that holds it all together.”
— Chris Whitmer