PhET Blog

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 phethelp@colorado.edu.

Thanks for your patience during our system maintenance.

Watch your solution change color as you mix chemicals with water. Then check molarity with the concentration meter. What are all the ways you can change the concentration of your solution? Switch solutes to compare different chemicals and find out how concentrated you can go before you hit saturation!

On Thursday, June 7th from 9-12:30 PM, Trish Loeblein, PhET K-12 Specialist and Evergreen High School physics & chemistry teacher, along with a chemistry post-doc from PhET will be holding a workshop at the Instructional Support Facility (ISF) for the Cherry Creek School District in Centennial, CO on how to incorporate PhET into your high school chemistry class.

Space is limited. Please contact Mary Bartholomew at mbartholomew@cherrycreekschools.org to register for the workshop.

Cost: $10 (pay at door)

Location Details:
Instructional Support Facility (ISF)
Cherry Creek School District
5416 S. Riviera Way
Centennial, CO 80015

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

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.

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:

• Recognize that molecule shape is due to repulsions between atoms.
• Recognize that bonds are not fixed in place, but can rotate around in response to repulsions.

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!