PhET Blog

PhET as an Open Education Resource is excited about the US Department of Education’s new #GoOpen Campaign that encourages states, districts, schools, and teachers to use openly licensed educational resources.

For more info, see: http://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/us-department-education-launches-campaign-encourage-schools-goopen-educational-resources

We are excited to bring the first (of many) translated #HTML5 simulations. Molarity in Peruvian Spanish is now available at https://phet.colorado.edu/sims/html/molarity/latest/molarity_es_PE.html. We along with many volunteer translators worked hard over the summer to get the translation utility ready. Look for many more #HTML5 translated sims to come!

In the new ‪#‎HTML5‬ Hooke’s Law simulation, students can flexibly explore relationships between applied force, spring force, spring constant, and displacement as they stretch and compress springs. They can simultaneously compare two different springs, or compare systems of springs connected in series and parallel. On the Energy screen, students can investigate force and energy plots and discover the effect of the spring constant and displacement on the potential energy stored in the spring.

See how we are working on making PhET sims accessible in this slideshare.

Have you seen the video primer for Balancing Chemical Equations? See how to use the Intro and Game panels as well as how you can use the simulation to challenge your students.

See Area Builder‘s video primer to learn about how you can use this sim to teach students about area and perimeter. Students can explore with rectangular and irregular shapes, discover the relationship between area and perimeter, and apply fractional knowledge as they build shapes with a given area and perimeter.