PhET Blog

Looking for a lesson on projectile motion for middle school? This lesson plan submitted by UTeach at UT-Austin has students investigate how air resistance affects different objects. Lesson objectives include:

• Students will be able to describe projectile motion with no air resistance.
• Students will be able to explain the effect of air resistance on a projectile.
• Students will be able to explain the relationship between shape and air resistance.
• Students will be able to contrast the motion of a projectile without air resistance to motion with air resistance.
• Students will be able to predict the amount of air resistance an object would have relative to other objects.

Standards addressed: TEKS Science: 8.3C, 8.6C CCRS Science Standards: VIII-C1

Chemistry Teachers – Getting ready for the new year?

See how Trish Loeblein, PhET K-12 Specialist and Evergreen High School physics & chemistry teacher, uses PhET sims in her high school chemistry course. The lessons include how to use PhET for demos, in-class activities, homeworks, and concept questions.

(The activities were designed for Trish’s Honors Chemistry course but can be easily adapted for many levels and needs.)

Physics Teachers – Getting ready for the new year?

See how Trish Loeblein, PhET K-12 Specialist and Evergreen High School physics & chemistry teacher, uses sims during these first semester activities on kinematics. The lessons include how to use PhET for demos, in-class labs, homeworks, and concept questions.

(The activities are appropriate for many levels and can easily be adapted for your particular needs.)

This inquiry-based lab, written by PhET’s Noah Podolefsky, is great to teach Middle Schoolers about kinetic energy, potential energy and conservation of energy–before they hit the skate park for real over the summer!

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?

These inquiry-based activities are ideal for Grades 5-8. Through these activities students will be able to describe what air looks like at a microscopic level, explain how air applies pressure, and predict how various changes affect the pressure.

This inquiry-based activity enables students to design their own experiment where they learn how to determine the gravitational acceleration on Planet X.

Use this activity to help students learn how to write their own quadratic equation for the projectile path as they simulate various feats such as throwing a free throw, jumping a car, or shooting a missile over the Eiffel Tower.

Use this activity to help students understand how well a curve describes a data set. Learning goals include:
- how range, uncertainty and number of data points affect correlation coefficient and chi squared
- how correlation coefficient and chi squared can be used to indicate how well a curve describes the data relationship
- how to apply Curve Fitting to design better experiments

Looking for some clicker questions and activities for Salts & Solubility? These questions & activities are from Trish Loeblein, PhET K-12 Specialist and Evergreen High School physics & chemistry teacher.