ETEC 522 – May 2012

PhET

PhET is a non-profit organization that provides free interactive simulations of physical phenomena on their website.

The PhET team consists of diverse individuals including research associates, software engineers, website architectures, marketing managers, and high-school teachers. The team believes that their research-based simulations enable students to make connections between real-life phenomena and the underlying science. To help students visually comprehend concepts, PhET simulations animate what is invisible to the eye through the use of graphics and intuitive controls such as click-and-drag manipulation, sliders and radio buttons. The purpose of these simulations is to deepen understanding and appreciation of the physical world.

The founder of the PhET project is Carl Edwin Wieman. He is a physicist at the University of British Columbia and the University of Colorado at Boulder; he was awarded the Lorentz Medal in 1998 and won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2001, along with Eric Allin Cornell and Wolfgang Ketterle, for fundamental studies of Bose-Einstein condensate. Based on his bio, Wieman is currently heading a science education initiative at UBC, and he is heavily involved with efforts at improving science education and has conducted educational research on science instruction. He has the technical knowledge, the experience, the reputation, the team, and the connections to make PhET successful.

Note: Wieman is pictured on the left.