PhET Blog

Thank you Royal Society of Chemistry for your generous support of PhET!

Support from our community is invaluable for keeping the simulations up to date (including the HTML5 work) and free for all.

If you want to help support PhET, donate at http://phet.colorado.edu/donate

If you’d like to become a corporate sponsor, please e-mail [email protected]. Depending upon the level of sponsorship, your logo can appear on our website which has had over 70 million sims served!

After teaching middle school science for three years, Bryce is excited about joining PhET as sim designer and IRB coordinator. During his time in the classroom Bryce used PhET sims including Radioactive Dating Game and Projectile Motion in his inquiry science units. After using PhET extensively in his teaching, Bryce is looking forward to designing new sims to engage students in topics like Geology and Astronomy.

Bryce is from Iowa, where he studied science education at the University of Iowa. He moved to Boulder in 2008 to study education and received his MA in Curriculum and Instruction from CU in 2010. Communicating science and advocating for science literacy are Bryce’s passions. In his free time, he likes to play ultimate (frisbee not fighting), soccer and board games as well as to cook and eat good food.

We’re excited about our new grant proposal that we submitted to the Dept. of Education on building and studying math simulations, specifically for middle school. The funding would significantly expand our offering math offerings so keep your fingers crossed!

We are delighted to announce that PhET Founder and Nobel Laureate, Carl Wieman, is returning to the University of Colorado Boulder this fall to serve part-time as PhET’s Senior Advisor. Carl will also join the faculty at Stanford University, in a split appointment between their Department of Physics and School of Education.

Says PhET Director, Kathy Perkins, “Carl is great to work with, and I’m very excited to be able to partner with him once again to advance PhET’s impact on STEM education over the next 10 years. The expertise in science education and education research that he brings to the project are absolutely invaluable.”

For more information, see http://phys.colorado.edu/events/carl-wieman-returns-cu-phet-senior-advisor.

Please be patient with any issues or questions regarding PhET simulations. Boulder, including the University of Colorado, has been experiencing devastating flooding and the University is officially closed. If you have any issues, please continue to send e-mails to [email protected]. But please be patient, we will get back to you.

Teaching HS physics?

Here’s a guide to PhET simulations and activities for high-school level courses. In the guide, you’ll find example simulations, activities and demos for Mechanics (e.g., Moving Man, Energy Skate Park, and Masses and Springs) and Electricity & Magnetism (e.g., Waves on a String, Electric Field Hockey, and Circuit Construction Kit).

Wishing everyone a great 2013-2014 year. And, look for new HTML5 next-gen sims coming out soon!

Looking for a fun educational way to cool off? Adjust mountain snowfall and temperature to see the glacier grow and shrink in our Glaciers simulation. Use scientific tools to measure thickness, velocity and glacial budget.

Last April, we hosted a Swedish TV film producer and crew that were interested in featuring the University of Colorado’s efforts in STEM education in a 30-minute episode for a Swedish television series on education. While the narration is in Swedish, the interviews with Founder, Carl Wieman, CU professors, and students are in English. See PhET in action at CU in the classrooms.

Here’s a link to the special that was aired on May 10, 2013 in Sweden:

http://urplay.se/Produkter/175595-Jakten-pa-det-demokratiska-klassrummet-University-of-Colorado

“Is there a democratic classroom? Carl Wieman works to improve science education in the United States. At the University of Colorado scientists show that active learning, combined with new pedagogical tools give better results. Through web-based interactive tool, students can simulate the lab at their computers. Carl Wieman says, much of the science that is taught in the classroom allows students to sit with their brains turned off, while the teacher takes care thinking.”

Want to keep those maths skills fresh over the summer? Try Fraction Matcher sim. Match shapes and numbers to earn stars in this fractions game. Students can challenge themselves at different levels, collecting stars as they improve their fraction skills.

On June 18, 2013, Oracle released Java 7 update 25 (1.7.0_25), which introduced an incompatibility that prevents PhET simulations from launching when using either the “Run Now” button on the website or the PhET Offline Website installer.

Oracle has fixed the problem and the fix should be available in the next version of Java (although this new version may not be released for some time).

Until this problem has been resolved, the best work-around for users experiencing this issue is to “Download” local copies of the simulations. When you press the “Download” button on a sim page, a “.jar” file will be downloaded. You can then double click the “.jar” file to run the sim locally. (Please note: on a Mac, you will have to right-click the “.jar” file and select “Open.”)