With Spring finally here and rainbows soon to follow, explore PhET’s Bending Light simulation and learn why rainbows are ROYGBIV.
We’re excited to add our last Java-based simulation, Energy Forms and Changes. Explore how heating and cooling iron, brick, and water adds or removes energy. See how energy is transferred between objects. Build your own system, with energy sources, changers, and users. Track and visualize how energy flows and changes through your system.
We’ve been busy working on making our simulations iPad compatible. We hope to have a number of them ready over the summer so they will be available for the 2013-2014 school year, including Build an Atom, Concentration, and Ohm’s Law.
Right now user donations are our key source of funding towards converting simulations to HTML5 and bringing them to iPad and Android tablets.
So please consider donating today. And, thank you to those of you who have already donated. Your support will help keep our work funded through the summer.
Donate Now to help support iPad compatibility!
In the middle of modern physics? Try our “Intro to Photoelectric Effect Interactive Lecture.” These lecture notes include many concept questions and an interactive lecture demo, for a 2-3 day introduction to the Photoelectric Effect.
Ever wonder how a new simulation is created? In this new video PhET: Research and Development, you can see what’s behind the development of a PhET simulation and how we use research to enhance learning. Learn how we choose what topic to address, all the way through to how we test our simulations.
With the new “Acceleration Lab” tab in the Forces and Motion: Basics simulation, students use an acceleration meter and a bucket of water to explore the concepts of speed, acceleration and net force, and learn how they relate to Newton’s Second Law of Motion: F=ma.
With the new Radiating Charge simulation, you can learn how electric field lines from a point charge evolve in time as the charge moves. Watch radiation propagate outward at the speed of light as you wiggle the charge. Stop a moving charge to see bremsstrahlung (braking) radiation. Explore the radiation patterns as the charge moves with sinusoidal, circular, or linear motion. You can move the charge any way you like, as long as you don’t exceed the speed of light.
We’re excited to add another simulation to our growing mathematics collection. With the new Graphing Lines simulation, explore the world of lines. Investigate the relationships between linear equations, slope, and graphs of lines. Challenge yourself in the line game!
If you’re running Java 7, we strongly encourage you update to Java Update 13 (build 1.7.0_13-b20). This latest Java release includes critical security patches and makes running Java in the browser more safe.
Get the upgrade here:
And if you’d like to learn more about the update, read about it here:
Note to Mac Users: to run our 3D simulations, Molecule Shapes or Plate Tectonics, you will still have to downgrade to Java 6 as described in our previous blog.
Have you tried Plate Tectonics or Molecule Shapes, but couldn’t get these sims to run on your computer?
Well, try again! We’ve upgraded both to work on as many platforms as possible. Please note that the simulations use LWJGL for the 3D graphics. Unfortunately, at this time LWJGL does not support Java 7 on Mac OSX. For to run these simulations, it is necessary to downgrade your Java to version 6. To learn how to do this, see
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5559?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US
If you’re still having troubles, please let us know so we can ensure that it works for everyone.
Help bring PhET to tablets: Donate to PhET today.
