PhET Blog

See our paper “Factors promoting engaged exploration with computer simulations” in Physical Review ST to learn more about how features of PhET sims enable students to pose questions and answer them in ways that may not be supported by more traditional educational materials.

Among the many improvements we’ve been making, the entire website — not just the sims — is now translatable. This makes it easier for our many international users who make up 34% of all users. The top countries other than the US are Canada, UK, Brazil, Germany, Australia and the Netherlands. Thanks everyone for playing on PhET.

See you at VSS 2010 in Glendale, AZ November 14-16.

If you are a member of the National Science Teachers Association, we have an article in the October Issue of The Science Teacher. Sims for Science: Powerful tools to support inquiry-based teaching on page 46 talks about how the design features of PhET sims support inquiry learning and gives some examples of inquiry-based activities.

Try out our new and improved Charges and Fields sim that we deployed earlier this week. It runs much faster when displaying the potential field lines.

Here’s a picture of the PhET team in August 2010.

We just published a new version of the Greenhouse Effect sim with a new tab called “Photon Absorption.” This new tab lets you see how light (visible photons) and heat (infrared photons) interact with the different atmospheric gases: methane, carbon dioxide, water, nitrogen and oxygen. It also lets you build your own atmosphere so you can see what gases contribute most to the greenhouse effect.