PhET Blog

Thank you McGraw Hill for supporting PhET through a generous donation.

If you want to become a sponsor, go to CU Foundation PhET Project Fund. Or, e-mail kathryn.dessau@colorado.edu. Depending upon the level of sponsorship, your logo can appear on our website which has had over 70 million sims served!

Teachers, we need your input!

We have been experimenting with the addition of a new “Teacher” menu in our simulations. See “Teacher” along the upper left hand navigation in Molecule Shapes or Molecule Shapes: Basics. There you can change the background color to white.

Can you let us know how you might use this new Teacher menu and/or “white background” option in the comments below?

Thank you Texas Instruments for supporting PhET through a generous donation.

If you want to become a sponsor, go to CU Foundation PhET Project Fund. Or, e-mail kathryn.dessau@colorado.edu. Depending upon the level of sponsorship, your logo can appear on our website which has had over 70 million sims served!

The University of Colorado Office of Information Technology will be performing a scheduled system reboot of the PhET server on Sunday, March 25 at 11:00 PM Mountain Daylight Time. During this time, PhET (http://phet.colorado.edu) will experience periods of unavailability. We expect that the outage will last only 10 minutes and that we will be back online very quickly. However, if you experience issues, please e-mail the PhET Help Desk at phethelp@colorado.edu.

Thanks for your patience during our system maintenance.

Thank you Pearson for your generous donation—and for using PhET in Mastering Physics, Mastering Chemistry and a number of textbooks.

National Science Foundation

NSF has invested over $3M in PhET over the past 9 years. Today, PhET’s work and impact on science education worldwide is highlighted in a new article at the NSF website. We would like to think its been a worthy use of tax-payer dollars!

A BIG thanks to those of you who have donated!

For those of you still considering to donate before the end of the year, here’s what we’ve done in the last year. PhET has:
- published 15 new sims including Build an Atom, Bending Light and Gravity and Orbits
- initiated teacher professional development webinars that we offer for free
- continued our research to advance effective simulation design and use, expanding to middle school grades
- began planning a new teacher support system which will include videos of exemplary sim classroom use, more teacher activities and concept questions
- expanded PhET usage to over 25 M sims per year around the world (~65% growth from the previous year) and increased our translated sims to over 64 languages

PhETsims will always be free, but we need your help.
Support PhET during our annual campaign.
Donate here. Or by clicking on the Donate Now button at phet.colorado.edu.

PhETsims will always be free, but we need your help.
Support PhET during our annual campaign.
Donate here. Or by clicking on the Donate Now button at phet.colorado.edu.

We’re excited to welcome Ariel Paul, Emily Moore, Julia Chamberlain and Oliver Nix to Team PhET. Research Associate Ariel’s expertise is in physics while Emily and Julia add chemistry expertise. Oliver Nix is our Project Coordinator and the person behind phethelp@colorado.edu.

We’re excited to announce that PhET was named as a laureate of The Tech Awards 2011. The Tech Awards recognizes 15 global innovators each year for applying technology to benefit humanity and spark global change. The Tech Awards, a signature program of The Tech Museum, and presented by Applied Materials, Inc., selected the PhET project from among hundreds of nominations representing 54 countries.

Established in 2000, The Tech Awards: Technology Benefiting Humanity is one of the premier annual humanitarian awards programs in the world, recognizing technical solutions that benefit humanity and address the most critical issues facing our planet and its people.

For more info, see: The Tech Awards 2011