I love PhET! Wow… it feels great just to say it.
What is PhET?
PhET is a free (woo!), online, java-based simulation experience. It is maintained by the University of Colorado and the assorted sims are created by some fantastic designers.
Let’s take a look: Start my adventure!
| Click to Run |
Why I Love PhET
- Free!
- Interactive
- Fun
- Students are doing “real” science (suddenly the scientific method isn’t just some steps to memorize)
- You can do things that you could NEVER do in a lab, library, or classroom (smashing cars, breeding millions of bunnies)
- Many of the sims have been translated into other languages
- Teachers contribute lab and activity ideas
- Range of difficulty levels
- You can embed sims used in the classroom in class blog or website
- They are VERY open to suggestions. If there is something you would like to see turned into a sim (or if your students design something), it will be considered. I did a survey for them last year and wanted more low-level math. Presto! Done!
Thank you for showing PhET to us. I had never heard of it before. There is much learning we can do with simulations, especially at the school level. I cringe to think how many frogs have been sacrificed for high school science and how many of us never, ever considered what it meant to have a classroom full of dead frogs. I, for one, did not go on to study science, and that frog dissection was completely lost on me. There is a time and place for real world, hands-on experiences, but there is also a place for proper preparation, to ensure we maximize learning from those experiences.