PhET Blog

Thank you to everyone who stopped by our booth at the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics Annual Meeting in Denver this past April. We thoroughly enjoyed meeting with all the math teachers and having the opportunity to share the awesome free resource that is PhET! In addition, we were grateful for being a featured component of several talks, such as Mark Roddy’s discussion about Mathematizing the World. We look forward to the next NCTM Conference in New Orleans, April 9-12, 2014, and meeting even more great educators. We are excited to expand our suite of math simulations, so look for more coming soon!

We’re excited to announce our very own Trish Loeblein, PhET K-12 Specialist, was honored to receive the ACS 2013 Colorado High School Teaching Award.

Trish has taught all levels of science including chemistry, physics and math, including many AP courses. Trish was recognized because she “brings an enormous energy to the classroom” and “goes out of her way to teach difficult concepts in a more tangible manner, a skill which is necessary for challenging chemistry and physics courses.”

Congratulations Trish!

We will be upgrading the PhET server on Friday, April 19 at 5:30 PM Mountain Daylight Time. During this time, PhET (http://phet.colorado.edu) will experience periods of unavailability. We expect that the outage will last only 30 minutes and that we will be back online very quickly. However, if you experience issues, please e-mail the PhET Help Desk at [email protected].

Thanks for your patience during our system upgrade.

We’ve been busy working on making our simulations iPad compatible. We hope to have a number of them ready over the summer so they will be available for the 2013-2014 school year, including Build an Atom, Concentration, and Ohm’s Law.

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 consider donating today. And, thank you to those of you who have already donated. Your support will help keep our work funded through the summer.

Donate Now to help support iPad compatibility!

In a new report by the Software & Information Industry Association, “Guide to the Use of Open Educational Resources in K-12 and Postsecondary Education,” open educational resources, like PhET are “here to stay.” This white paper from the SIIA’s Education Division’s working group was written to provide an increased understanding of OER’s impact and usage in schools.

Ever wonder how a new simulation is created? In this new video PhET: Research and Development, you can see what’s behind the development of a PhET simulation and how we use research to enhance learning. Learn how we choose what topic to address, all the way through to how we test our simulations.

PhET is one of many providers of “Open Educational Resources” (OER) and is a big supporter of the larger open education movement. This week brings many opportunities to learn more about OER projects and the opportunity for OER to impact teaching and learning worldwide. See their list of events here:

http://www.openeducationweek.org/events-webinars/

We’re excited to announce that PhET is now a 100Kin10 Partner. 100Kin10 is a multi-sector partnership addressing the national imperative to train 100,000 science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) teachers by 2021. See the press release here.

In our new video, Nobel Laureate Carl Wieman explains how and why he started PhET.