With summer fun here, explore how many calories are in your favorite summer foods and how much exercise you’d need to burn them off with the Eating and Exercise simulation.
Read about how PhET Makes Learning Science Fun on the National Science Foundation’s Science, Engineering and Education (SEE) Innovations website.
“The PhET project’s main goals are to make science accessible, understandable and fun. In the new ‘Build A Molecule’ simulation, for example, students learn as they play. They discover that collections of atoms create molecules; that the number, type, and order of the atoms matter; and that the ‘twos’ in 2CO2 mean different things. Students build connections that provide a key foundation to understanding chemistry–connections between chemical names, chemical symbols, atomic arrangements and molecule shapes. In a recent study, fifth-grade students using the simulation demonstrated that they had learned these ideas–ideas that have been documented as difficult even at the college level.”
PhET Simulations are used not only in the United States, but also around the world. Rollan Inis from the Tagum City National High School in Tagum City, Philippines writes that Philippine teachers from remote “barangays” will be using the offline installation of PhET to “teach science in a very interesting manner.” In addition, PhET was used at a Grade 8 teacher training program held by the Department of Education.
Thanks Rollan for spreading the word on how PhET can enhance science and math learning in schools around the world.
Do you have a story on how PhET sims are being used? Please e-mail Kathy at [email protected].
PhET Interactive Simulations is now on Wikipedia at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhET_Interactive_Simulations
We worked on the article through a Peer to Peer University School of Open Education Program:Peer to Peer University/Writing Wikipedia Articles. Thanks #WIKISOO for helping us get PhET into Wikipedia.
Even though school’s ending, PhET will be hard at work over the summer upgrading the simulations for the new school year. And, right now, user donations are our key source of funding towards converting simulations to HTML5 and bringing them to iPad and Android tablets. So please help support our summer vacation work and give the gift of learning.
Donate today. And, thank you to those of you who have already donated. Your support will help keep our work funded through the summer.
Teaching chemistry? To help you find the best simulation for teaching a specific topic in chemistry, we’ve put together this new preliminary guide that gives you a line up of specific simulations (and supplemental simulations) for topic areas in the general chemistry curriculum.
Want to share suggestions of other PhET sims you use for teaching chemistry topics? Let us know at the PhET Help Desk at [email protected].
We will be upgrading the PhET servers on Friday, May 24 at 6:00 PM Mountain Daylight Time. We expect that the maintenance will last only 30 minutes. During this time, PhET (http://phet.colorado.edu) may experience periods of unavailability. If you experience persistent issues, please e-mail the PhET Help Desk at [email protected].
Thanks for your patience during our system maintenance.
Have you received our May 2013 newsletter? Learn about two big initiatives that we’re working on over the summer: a new “Teach with PhET” companion website designed for teachers and other education professionals, and the development of the next-generation of PhET simulations.
Join us and support PhET. Your dollars will go directly to helping with these important improvements. Donate to PhET’s End-of-School Campaign today.
Didn’t receive the newsletter? Sign up at our website.
A big Shout Out to Bernard LaCour who pointed out a bug in Fluid Pressure and Flow. As soon as we heard about the problem, we addressed the issue and posted the fix. We know how important it is to correct any issue with our simulations. So if you find a problem, please let us know through the PhET Help Desk at [email protected].
Thank you Bernard!
With Spring finally here and rainbows soon to follow, explore PhET’s Bending Light simulation and learn why rainbows are ROYGBIV.
