Licensing Information

Commercial Partnerships with PhET

Education technology companies, publishers, media libraries, and hardware providers are partnering with PhET to transform their educational products with PhET's award-winning collection of interactive simulations. A partnership provides additional benefits and services that help you to get the most out of the collection of simulations.

Learn about commercial partnerships

Using PhET Simulations in Teaching

Any students or educators (K-12, university, or continuing education) can use the simulations for free. You do not need to seek any further permissions from us.

All simulations available at https://phet.colorado.edu are open educational resources and provided under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license (CC BY 4.0).The following attribution is required when sharing or redistributing a PhET simulation:

See these best practices for attribution.

Using PhET Simulations for Research

Education research guides the design and classroom use of PhET simulations. Not only does the PhET team engage in education research directly, but we love to see PhET simulations being used by researchers worldwide to advance knowledge about teaching, learning, and assessment.

Researchers are encouraged to use PhET simulations from https://phet.colorado.edu in their work. These sims are openly licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license (CC BY 4.0). No further permission is necessary to use the simulations in research provided two steps are followed:

  1. Include proper attribution when a simulation, or any derivative work (e.g. screenshot or video), appears in any education materials, presentations, journal articles, websites, or other channels you may use to distribute your work. Example attribution:

Researchers interested in customizing simulations or collecting back-end data for use in learning engineering or learning analytics research may be interested in PhET’s interoperable simulations, our PhET-iO simulations. Learn more about PhET-iO.

Teacher-Submitted Activities

A wide variety of teaching activities have been contributed by the PhET team and its user community, and are available for you to adapt and use in your classroom. If an activity is marked as a contribution from the PhET team (as indicated by the presence of a PhET logo in the author field), it has been posted as a CC-BY resource. For other activities, please contact the submitting author to affirm your use under a CC-BY license. The following attribution is required to share or redistribute CC-BY activities or adapted activities:

  • Activity by [author] licensed under CC-BY-4.0 ([link to activity page]).
    OR

  • This activity has been adapted from an activity by [author] licensed under CC-BY-4.0 ([link to original activity page]).

Use of PhET Name and Logo (beyond attribution)

The PhET name and logo are registered trademarks of The Regents of the University of Colorado.

Use of the PhET name and/or PhET logo for promotional, marketing, or advertising purposes requires a license agreement, and is included as part of our low-cost Basic Partnership. Learn more about our Partnership Program.

PhET-iO Simulations

PhET’s interoperable sims provide enhanced capabilities for interoperability with a wide variety of educational technology, including customization, streaming output data, and versatile API control. PhET-iO sims are a licensed product. Learn more about PhET-iO.

PhET Source Code

Most PhET simulation source code is available under an open source license – either MIT or GPL. PhET-iO source code is not openly licensed.

Full Text Agreements

Support PhET’s Work

PhET Interactive Simulations at the University of Colorado Boulder is a non-profit organization, reaching hundreds of millions of learners globally. Please support PhET with a tax-deductible donation today!