PhET Blog

With her background in math, Karina will be focusing on building our math simulation suite. For her Ph.D. thesis at the University of Florida, she studied “the instructional practices of math teachers who were successful with traditionally underperforming students.” She has a particular interest in culture, issues of equity, and the education of marginalized students.

Karina was attracted to PhET because, as a project, it puts out quality, research-based products for teachers – for free. In her free time, Karina likes to cook healthy vegetarian foods that even carnivores can enjoy.

Help support PhET Donate to PhET’s Annual Campaign today.

If you’ve recently updated to Mac OS X 10.7 or 10.8, you may have received the message:

“To open this Web Start application, you need to download
the Java Runtime Environment.”

That’s because Apple Java was removed during the latest update. So when you receive this message, click “More Info“, and you will be taken to the java.com website for Version 7 at http://www.java.com/en/download/help/mac_install.xml.
Note: Once you’ve installed Java, you may need to reload or quit your browser in order to enable Java in your browser.

If you’re running Mountain Lion OS X 10.8, Gatekeeper (the new program introduced in OS X 10.8 designed to prevent potentially malicious apps from launching) may block the launch of the PhET sim. To override this, either modify Gatekeeper’s default settings or explicitly right/control-click the application and choose Open.

If you have additional questions, please e-mail [email protected].

Help support PhET Donate to PhET’s Annual Campaign today.

Dear Fellow Educators, Administrators, Education Resource Providers,

We need your help!

To help us secure future funding to advance our work and keep PhET free, and to make the site as useful as possible for you, we need to know more about how, where, and why you use PhET in your teaching, and how you see the simulations influencing your students’ learning. We also want your input on future directions for the PhET project.

We are seeking very broad representation, so please forward this invitation to any educators you know.

If you are …

K12 Teacher who teaches with PhET:
https://cuboulder.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_5z4mrcuB1JwW9mZ

College Faculty who teaches with PhET:
https://cuboulder.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_a9TLQpQd0cRB6fz

Use PhET in your education work or product (but not in teaching K12 or college):
https://cuboulder.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_5bEt1hYhrHhUIFT

Familiar with PhET, but do NOT USE PhET in your work:
https://cuboulder.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_e34gOkbneq7q0M5

If any of these links don’t work, go here:
http://tinyurl.com/phetsurvey
Or copy and paste one of the URLs above into your internet browser.

Your participation is entirely voluntary, and your individual responses to this survey will be confidential. If you would like your institution to appear on a list or map of PhET users, you will have an opportunity to provide permission.

The survey results will be compiled to help improve PhET. Only aggregated results or anonymous statements will be used in any publications or reports, be disseminated on our website, or used in presentations to funders, educators, or researchers.

Thank you for your time and feedback!

Your PhET Team,
Kathy Perkins, Kathy Dessau, Noah Podolefsky, Mike Dubson, Robert Parson, Trish Loeblein, Noah Finkelstein, Emily Moore, Ariel Paul, Julia Chamberlain, Karina Hensberry, John Blanco, Jon Olson, Chris Malley, Sam Reid, Sam McKagan, Danny Rehn, Jesse Garrison, Linda Wellmann, and Oliver Nix

Thank you McGraw Hill for supporting PhET through a generous donation.

If you want to become a sponsor, go to CU Foundation PhET Project Fund. Or, 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!

Teachers, we need your input!

We have been experimenting with the addition of a new “Teacher” menu in our simulations. See “Teacher” along the upper left hand navigation in Molecule Shapes or Molecule Shapes: Basics. There you can change the background color to white.

Can you let us know how you might use this new Teacher menu and/or “white background” option in the comments below?

Thank you Texas Instruments for supporting PhET through a generous donation.

If you want to become a sponsor, go to CU Foundation PhET Project Fund. Or, 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!

The University of Colorado Office of Information Technology will be performing a scheduled system reboot of the PhET server on Sunday, March 25 at 11:00 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 10 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 maintenance.

Thank you Pearson for your generous donation—and for using PhET in Mastering Physics, Mastering Chemistry and a number of textbooks.

National Science Foundation

NSF has invested over $3M in PhET over the past 9 years. Today, PhET’s work and impact on science education worldwide is highlighted in a new article at the NSF website. We would like to think its been a worthy use of tax-payer dollars!

A BIG thanks to those of you who have donated!

For those of you still considering to donate before the end of the year, here’s what we’ve done in the last year. PhET has:
- published 15 new sims including Build an Atom, Bending Light and Gravity and Orbits
- initiated teacher professional development webinars that we offer for free
- continued our research to advance effective simulation design and use, expanding to middle school grades
- began planning a new teacher support system which will include videos of exemplary sim classroom use, more teacher activities and concept questions
- expanded PhET usage to over 25 M sims per year around the world (~65% growth from the previous year) and increased our translated sims to over 64 languages

PhETsims will always be free, but we need your help.
Support PhET during our annual campaign.
Donate here. Or by clicking on the Donate Now button at phet.colorado.edu.