December 2012 Newsletter from PhET

Sam overseas for PhET

Help keep PhET free! Individual donations bring science to kids in your town and around the world.

So please consider:

$15	if you're a teacher who uses a few sims
$25-50+	if you use more sims
$200+	for individual schools
$500+	for districts

All donations are tax deductible.

Thanks for your support!

In the Pipeline:

Energy Forms and Changes
Line Graphing
Chemical Reactions
Functions
and more...

Upcoming Events:

American Chemical Society
New Orleans, LA
April 7-11, 2013

NSTA
San Santonio, TX
April 11-14, 2013

National Council of Teachers of Mathematics
Denver, CO
April 17-20, 2013

Have you completed our survey?

If not, please help PhET by giving us your feedback.

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Feedback or Suggestions?

If you have any ideas, please let us know at phethelp@colorado.edu.

Be One of the First to Experience our Sims on Tablets

Are you an iPad or Android tablet user? You'll be happy to hear that we've been busy working on a pathway to make our more popular sims tablet compatible. We've been prototyping sims and testing out various HTML5 libraries with advice from Google and other HTML5 developers.

If you would like to take a quick peek at our progress, try the HTML5 prototypes:

Please keep in mind that these sims are prototypes. Many lack the complete physics models, array of features, and polished look-and-feel of our published sims on our website, but we wanted to give you a sense of our progress so far.

Keeping up with technology change is a resource-intensive challenge. You can help support the conversion of the sims to tablet compatibility by donating today!

Featured New Sims:

The latest addition to our simulations designed specifically for middle school science! Explore the forces at work in a tug of war or pushing a refrigerator, crate, or person. Create an applied force and see how it makes objects move. Change friction and see how it affects the motion of objects.

After the activity, students will be able to:

Identify when forces are balanced vs unbalanced.
Determine the sum of forces (net force) on an object with more than one force on it.
Predict the motion of an object with zero net force.
Predict the direction of motion given a combination of forces.

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PhET's Annual Campaign