Thanks, Brian!

Hi Jackie, Thanks for your quesetions.

Yes, we provide classroom materials at both the college and K-12 levels – those developed by us as well as materials contributed by teacher users. You can browse the materials and see our teacher PD videos and materials here: http://phet.colorado.edu/en/for-teachers

We’ve engaged in research in a number of contexts – lecture, lab, inquiry-based tutorials, etc. – as well as studying design through interviews. We cannot research every sim due to resources, but we test every sim with students. You can see our research papers here: http://phet.colorado.edu/en/research

We’ve studied simulation design quite a bit, and focused on an approach we call implicit scaffolding – that is scaffolding through the design of the sim.

Some other interesting recent findings: In one study, we investigated how varying guidance in a sim-based activity worksheet impacted student engagement. Less guidance produces more engagement with the sim. In another study, we investigated how the students in a large lecture interacted with the sim and the nature of their discussion during an initial free-exploration time of about 10 minutes, and demonstrated that the implicit saffolding in the sim engaged students in productive on-task exploration and investigation. In another study, we demonstrated learning of coefficients and subscripts in a chemical formula by 5th graders – a difficulty that persists through college. More are at the weblink!

Hi Randy,

We really try to make these flexible tools – so there is no dominant use case. We did a survey a couple of years ago and got over 3000 responses. Results are in a 2014 PER Conference proceedings paper which should be out soon. Teachers used these in many different ways – hands-on inquiry, in labs, front of room demos or discussions, with clicker questions. Some teachers use just a few, and others use 20+. You can see an example of how these can work together in one course here – showing the sim and the type of use: http://phet.colorado.edu/files/guides/Planning/...

Hi Ben,
Great questions. We look to address topics/concepts that are challenging for students (e.g. research has established student difficulties) and which can really benefit from the affordances the simulation can offer (e.g. multiple representation, immediate feedback, showing the invisible, etc.). To develop a sim, we form a sim team which has a content expert, one or more teachers who teach the content to the target audience, and very importantly, a sim interface design expert (someone who knows a lot about how students interact with sims). One person is the sim lead, and responsible for the team progress, and also pulls in other stakeholders as needed. The software developer is also a member of the design team – and participate throughout the design and development process. We storyboard each sim. The most critical steps are to think carefully about the learning goals you are trying to achieve, and then about how the interaction with the sim will help support students in discovering and building those ideas/concepts. The interaction-feedback connection is absolutely critical. And for every sim we do student interviews, to make sure the students are engaged, exploring, having no trouble with usability, and importantly that their natural flow and interaction with the sim leads to learning the content ideas. We’ve written a number of papers about design, if you are interested.

Sounds like a wonderfully robust process. Thanks!

Thanks to you Ben and Kathy for the question and the explanation.
Kathy I would be grateful to have those papers about Sim design.

Hi John,
You can find our papers about sim design here: http://phet.colorado.edu/en/research

Thanks, Suzanne! We have been expanding our work in middle school recently, it’s great to hear that you’re finding a lot of people are aware of the sims. We have a new set of videos on the use of the simulations in K12 as well; see http://phet.colorado.edu/en/for-teachers/tipsFo... for tips on using and designing activities for K12. More coming…

Thanks, Bryson; yes, please do find the time to upload your activities. Our activity database is a really excellent resource for other educators.

Yes, Jack, we really do advocate using the simulations for these sorts of “process” goals, they are designed to support these kinds of inquiry/investigation goals. Our video on Designing Activities for K12, http://phet.colorado.edu/en/for-teachers/tipsFo..., has some ideas for using the sims in this way, for those of you who would like more info.

Hi Janice, We have a few threads of research that have looked at the sims impact. We do some classroom based assessments where we give pre/post tests to examine student learning around sim-based activities. We’ve also done studies where we contrast instructional approaches – sim vs real world equipment, sim vs no sim with clicker questions, sim vs no sim in tutorials. We also do studies around sim design through interviews. What we haven’t done, and would be great to do if we had resources/partners for it, would be a large scale study to examine sim vs business as usual instruction, or another interesting contrast, on a larger scale. We’ve also done assessments about students and teachers attitudes around the simulations.
We have some work beginning in collaboration with other researchers that focuses on using the sims as part of next-generation assessments. The HTML5 sims will be more useful for this as they will have enhanced versions that support back-end data and an API for configuration and interchangeability with other technologies/wrappers.

Thank you Henrique!

Excellent, Jenny, thanks!

Thanks, Bob! It’s great to hear about all of theses contexts in which you have been able to use PhET in your work. We’ll be updating our website soon, to make the sim-based activities more apparent to new educators visiting the site.

Thanks, Linda. It’s great to hear that you are using the sims in this way – to allow the students’ questions to guide the learning. I love it.

Thanks, Dr. Nkwenti!

Thanks, Rolly. So glad you find them useful for your work.

Hi John, Thank you for joining us from Ghana! There are many ways you can contribute, depending on your inclinations. You can:
- upload your sim-based lessons to our activity database to share with other teachers
- disseminate the simulations to schools without internet by downloading the entire website (our installer) to a thumbdrive and bringing the resources to other schools there.
- give local workshops around teaching with PhET (we have workshop materials available from our website, and we can give you some tips via email if you have questions)
- submit ideas for new sims or bugs or anything, to phethelp@colorado.edu
- translate the simulations into new languages — if there are rural langugages that would be useful for your region.
Are any of these areas where you would like to contribute?

Thanks, Chuleenee. It’s great to hear you find they encourage deeper learning.

Hi John, Thank you for the suggestion. Interestingly, one of our research collaborators is doing a small experiment around just that question. Where we introduced some noise into the voltage measurement in circuit construction kit. We’ll see how that impacts student interaction and learning.

Thank you, Shari, for sharing your experiences! It’s great to hear that the sim-based activities and conversion to HTML5 have been particularly useful for you. We’ll keep working on the HTML5 conversions. Are there other areas where you see some investment by our team would help teachers use PhET?
If you also design your own lessons, we would love to see them uploaded to the activity database!

Thank you, Lisa, for sharing. It’s great to hear that you find it useful to be able to edit the lessons/activities. We have always felt that even if we design a lesson, teachers will need to be empowered to customize it for their context so I’m glad to hear you appreciate that capability.
If you make improvements or modify for a different level, please consider uploading them back to the website. Thanks!

Thanks, Randy. It’s great to hear that these are benefiting the rural schools. That is certainly a goal for the team!

Hi Scott, We don’t have plans yet for social science simulations, but I can see how our design approaches could work well for some areas – like microeconomics, for instance. If you have ideas, send them along to phethelp@colorado.edu, and perhaps down the road we’ll look for a social science content/education expert who wants to partner on a project around this topic.

Hi Jackie! Thanks for your comments. From the few simulations we have done in biology, biology is a much harder design. We learned a lot doing a few, and I think we can design some good ones in partnership with biology content/education experts, but its definitely harder than physics, chemistry, or math. Biology concepts have more of a story-line and more complex behavior, and the “why” of the ideas is often harder to represent. But we will love the challenge, when the time hopefully comes someday and we can invest resources in biology sims.

Thanks, Phakathi!

Hi Carina, Thank you for sharing about your usage. It’s especially valuable to hear about the large range of students you’ve used them with – advanced students to those struggling students with behavioral problems.

Thank you, Timy! Great to hear about your use. One way you may want to contribute is by uploading sim-based lessons and activities that you use, for other teachers in your country to access. When you upload an activity, you can tag it with a language. Thanks again for sharing.

Hi Beth, Thanks for the feedback and the student input on games. We’re finding that games do work quite well in the math simulations that we are building now. They are opportunities for them to be challenged and test their understanding. If you design lessons for middle school with the sims, please consider sharing back to our activity database. We would love to have more middle school activities for different content and contexts. Thanks

We have a very successful mini-unit that involves the pressure and flow sim as research to engineer a plumbing system. I’ll make sure to share it!

Thanks for the comment, Robert, great to know you’ve found the sims helpful!

Hi Robert, It’s great to hear the new HTML5 sims embed nicely with your Vignette Studio. We’d be happy to help make this more seemless if you want access to the metadata. I assume you are using an iFrame to embed? Just let us know, if you need our assistance.

Oh – and down the road we are working to have the sims outfited with an API, which would allow you to hook into the data stream.

Thanks for the comment and feedback on the sims, Robert!

The issues can vary on a case-by-case basis, but I would recommend that you have your students first update to the latest version of Java. Then provide them with a link to the latest version of the sim (you can copy the link of the ‘Run Now’ button: http://phet.colorado.edu/sims/balance-and-torqu...).
Problems can occur when using an out-of-date version of the sim even with the latest version of Java.

This should take care of most of the issues that can arise. Mac users have the added step of saving the .jar/.jnlp to their hard drive and right-clicking to open the sim. Detailed instructions for Mac here:
http://phet.colorado.edu/en/troubleshooting/mac...

Excellent, Paul, please do share your activities on our activity database, if you haven’t already.

That’s so good to know, Mahdi, thanks for the support!

Hi Lisa, Great to hear that you are seeing deeper understanding in your students! We’ll keep working on the HTML5 sims … as you can imagine it takes time and money, but we are doing what we can to keep them coming. In the next few weeks you will see a change to the website, with the HTML5 versions integrated into the main structure of the website – along with some new design features to help bring attention to the activities. Hope you like the changes.

Thanks, Kimberle. It would be great to discuss how PhET sims might integrate into your notebook idea. The new HTML5 versions are pretty easy to integrate with an iFrame, you can take snapshots, and we are adding even more advanced API technologies. So it will be a good time to discuss as we work on standardizing those features.

Thanks, Emily. It’s great to hear about your use, and that they have been useful in your project!