PhET Blog

Meet Yuen-ying Carpenter who came to the PhET team with a PhD in chemistry, and an avid interest in investigating how college students learn in both core chemistry classes and in applied disciplines such as the energy sciences.

She brings with her both inquiry-based college curriculum development expertise from her time at the University of Calgary and Dalhousie University, as well as a taste for in informal science inquiry and outreach for all ages from the Calgary science centre, TELUS Spark.

When she’s not at PhET, Yuen-ying can be found biking around Boulder, or hanging out on a trapeze somewhere 10 ft in the air.

Have you seen our new home page? Simulations are easier to find with the large blue “Play” button. And, social media, informative You-Tube videos and newly added Pinterest buttons are now available on the right-hand side of every page.

Happy 2015 New Year!

A big ‘Thank You!’ to all of you who have already contributed to PhET during our 2014 Annual Giving Campaign.

If you considered donating, but haven’t gotten to it yet, there’s still time.

Please help support PhET with a donation to our Annual Giving Campaign. Together, we have impacted millions of students, with over 75 million sim runs in 2014 across 200 countries and territories. And at a complete project cost of only 2 cents per sim run. Your donation now will fuel our 2015 HTML5 sim conversions.

Every dollar really does help.

Whether you’re an educator, parent, student, STEM supporter or a company, consider sponsoring 500, 2500, or more sim runs with a donation of $10, $50, or more.

Donate Today: http://phet.colorado.edu/donate

Thank you and Happy New Year.

From our family to yours, we wish you all a Happy Holiday and New Year!

It’s #GivingTuesday! Please give the gift of science and math to millions of children around the world. If you’re an educator, parent, student, STEM supporter or a company, please consider donating to PhET today. Any amount helps — minimum donation is $10.

Donate

This Thanksgiving season, we at PhET are especially thankful to have such a wonderful PhET community. We thank you for:

• Including PhET in your lessons, lectures, labs, handouts, and homework
• Sharing your teaching activities on PhET with other teachers around the world
• Translating the simulations into over 70 languages

We are searching for qualified candidates who are interested in joining the PhET team as a full- or part-time “Professional Research Assistant.” We are seeking specifically educators with a background in teaching, preferably at the middle school or high school level.

With our current emphasis on building and studying simulations for middle school math and science, advancing our teacher professional development resources and support system, branching into tablet and touch-compatible simulation design, increasing the accessibility capabilities of our simulations, and advancing the use of simulations in undergraduate chemistry, responsibilities will include (but are not limited to):

1) Redesigning (as part of a 3-5 person team) existing PhET simulations, incorporating new findings on effective sim design and adapting designs for use on touch-devices. (Software programming is NOT required. PhET has a team of in-house software developers).
2) Designing new PhET simulations.
3) Conducting user-testing through interviews of students using simulations.
4) Supporting simulation design, development, and research efforts – e.g. analyzing data, supporting classroom research studies, searching for web resources, etc.
5) Helping to liaison to and support the K12 community.
6) Assisting with marketing and dissemination of PhET resources to teachers: develop and represent PhET in online teaching forums and resources; run exhibit booths at national and local conferences; assist with teacher workshops.
7) Responding to inquiries to PhET about science/math questions and new simulation ideas.

For more information and specific qualifications, see the online posting at:

https://www.jobsatcu.com/postings/89569

Please consider applying! And, share this information with your colleagues who might be interested.

Thanks!

Pictured from left to right:

Back row: Emily Moore, Emily Randall, Michael Dubson, Trish Loeblein, Kathy Perkins, Oliver Nix, Oliver Orejola, Arnab Purkayastha, Steele Dalton, Stephanie Chasteen, Beth Stade

Middle row: Liam Burke, Jesse Greenberg, Kathy Dessau, Chris Malley, Sam Reid, Jonathan Olson, Bryan Yoelin, Carl Wieman, Aaron Davis, Yuen-ying Carpenter

Front row: Amy Rouinfar, Robert Parson, John Blanco, Ariel Paul, Matthew Zhang, Amanda McGarry

(Not pictured): Linda Wellmann, Karina Hensberry, Sarah McKagan, Noah Finkelstein

For software developers: our educational HTML5 apps & libraries are open source and ready to use in your projects: http://bit.ly/phet-development-overview

Learn how to:

1. Check out the PhET HTML5 libraries and simulations from GitHub
2. Create new simulations
3. Understand & customize code for our simulations
4. Submit bug fixes for our simulations
5. Embed a PhET simulation in your own website
6. Use powerful libraries for rendering, audio, touch/mouse/pen input, geometry, MVC, UI and more.
7. Communicate with PhET developers and others developing with PhET libraries

Hope to see you there!

Try the new HTML5 Balancing Chemical Equations simulation! How do you know if a chemical equation is balanced? What can you change to balance an equation? Play a game to test your ideas. Students will learn to:

• Balance a chemical equation.
• Recognize that the number of atoms of each element is conserved in a chemical reaction.
• Describe the difference between coefficients and subscripts in a chemical equation.
• Translate from symbolic to molecular representations of matter.

Thank you American Association of Chemistry Teachers for your generous donation that supported the development of the new HTML5 Balancing Chemical Equations.