Try our new Molarity sim. What determines the concentration of a solution? Learn about the relationships between moles, liters, and molarity by adjusting the amount of solute and solution volume. Change solutes to compare different chemical compounds in water.
Energy Skate Park: Basics is the next sim in our Basics series designed specifically for our middle-school audience. In this sim, learn about conservation of energy with a skater dude! Explore different tracks and view the kinetic energy, potential energy and friction as he moves. Build your own tracks, ramps and jumps for the skater.
Sign up for the newest PhET Webinar brought to you by the ISTE.
Using PhET Simulations for Science Inquiry: Free, Researched, Web-Based Resources
The PhET Interactive Simulations project at the University of Colorado provides a free website of research-based simulations designed to support student learning through active engagement, including Energy Skate Park, Salts and Solubility, Gas Properties, Density, Circuit Construction Kit, and Build an Atom. The simulations are free, and can run from the PhET website (http://phet.colorado.edu) or downloaded to a local computer for offline use. This webinar will offer an opportunity to explore some of the PhET sims and collaborate with other webinar participants to investigate productive ways to incorporate these in your curriculum. Also, learn how to access lesson plans that PhET team members and other teachers have used and submitted to the Teaching Ideas database.
We’ve added another sim to our Basics series with the new Molecule Shapes: Basics sim designed specifically for our middle-school audience. In this sim, you will explore molecule shapes by building molecules in 3D! Find out how a molecule’s shape changes as you add atoms to a molecule.
Learning goals that Molecule Shapes: Basics addresses include:
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!
See PhET Director, Kathy Perkins, at the AAPT Winter Meeting in Ontario, CA February 4-8. She’ll be giving an invited talk on Monday Feb. 6th at 6:30 PM on “Teaching Physics with PhET Simulations: Engaging Students and Increasing Learning” Session CE02.
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.
Did you miss our webinar on November 15th?
Using PhET Simulations for Science and Mathematics Inquiry
Trish Loeblein, PhET K12 Specialist and Evergreen HS Teacher
Noah Podolefsky, Research Associate
The archived webinar is posted at The Middle School Portal 2: Math and Science Pathways project website.
In this webinar, we
1. focused on the middle level learner;
2. explored mathematics and science simulations such as Energy Skate Park, Equation Grapher, Estimation, Arithmetic, Density, Circuit Construction Kit, and Build an Atom;
3. investigated productive ways to incorporate PhET sims in your curriculum; and
4. learned about how to access lesson plans that PhET team members and other teachers have used and submitted to our Teaching Ideas database.
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.
National Science Foundation
