Excellent loved MATH work!

Anything I can do to help just count on me :D

Leonard Abella

Math Teacher

Bogotá, Colombia 

Hi Jennifer, 

The simulations are available on our website (http://phet.colorado.edu) and we also have an iPad App. They are open educational resources - so free to use - and we've worked hard to make sure they work across all platforms, including computers, chromebooks, and tablets. They work on phones, but the screen area is a bit small for optimal use (although the students have younger eyes than mine and seem to use it there anyways sometimes). 

We design the simulations to be highly flexible tools, so they can be integrated in class or used outside of class and with many different pedagogical approaches. I think the flipped classrroom would be a great option, where students engaged in with the sim outside the class to make some initial discoveries, and then brought their findings from that into the classrooms and the teacher was able to pick up a facilitated discussion from there. That said, so far for this new math work we've mostly been looking at student use of the sims in the classroom. 

Choosing a concept to simulate is a lengthy process in which we consider many things. Sometimes teachers make suggestions for topics, sometimes we turn to the literature for topics in mathematics where students struggle and that we think we can make a worthy contribution. We try to choose math concepts that would benefit from being simulated (as opposed to taught some other way). We also don't want to create a sim that is too similar to something that has been done before, so we consider concepts that other computer-based tools don't address or that we feel we could improve upon and do something different from what is already out there. Also, we try to choose concepts with rich, multiple ways of representing them because the dynamic linking of those representation in the sim is a powerful way to support student learning. It's lots for us to think about! 

Hi Jeremy, 

We've definitely had some learning moments in this work, and I'm sure we will have some more. As we've been working closely with teachers as they integrate the sims in their classrooms, we've recognized the challenge for math educators to find the time in their planning and in their classroom seat time to open a space for an inquiry-based sim lesson within their planned curriculum. This is a distinct contrast between math instruction and science instruction, which has built-in time for labs/activities. So we have started building lessons that are replacement days for a particular curriculum and can be swapped in. We want to support scaling and adoption of these resources by the math community, so we will be looking to see how this sort of approach may work for teachers. 

Ian, Karina, and team have also done some very nice work to examine how teachers use a sim in a lesson, and have characterized those ways. It helps us start to understand the types of teacher resources that are needed to better support teachers to fully leverage the sims. 

Kathy 

Hi David - thanks so much for sharing these links. They are great!

Thanks for your questions, Steven. We see teachers using PhET sims for formative assessment quite often. One approach I have seen work quite well is to have the sim at the front of the room and ask students to make a predication about something, and solicit ideas from the students. With every sim, we bring in students to interview, and we watch to see how they interpret the feedback from the sims and whether they identify the core relationships that we've identified as learning goals. 

Thank you, Katharine! Great to hear the sims have been so useful to you and your students. 

Thanks for your interest, Heidi! It's early days yet. We have been working closely with teachers and observing classrooms. Ian and team have some nice results about how teachers position the simulation in a lesson, how they facilitate the lesson, and the role of open play in the lesson. Our evaluation partner - SRI - is running a survey right now to survey math teachers as formative input on our work to inform our work on teacher resources. Next year, we will do a controlled study that looks both at classroom characteristics as well as student outcomes of business-as-usual and sim-based lessons for a small cohort of teachers who have never used PhET sims in instruction. 

Hi Kristen,

We hope to learn more about the resources that teachers need in order to effectively integrate sims into their classrooms in our upcoming pilot study. We currently provide video and downloadable teaching resources on the PhET website that are both generally about using PhET sims, writing activities, and facilitating classroom activities, as well as sim-specific resources such as key design features and lesson ideas.

A common challenge teachers have is how to use such an open-ended resource. Many teachers fear letting their students run wild with technology without first showing them how to use it. However, our research shows that students are more than capable of figuring out how to use a sim and learn a lot  from it before being given specific prompts! So we encourage open play time for all sim-based lessons before diving in to the challenge prompts directed at specific learning goals.

Katharine, you describe some of the very challenges we hear from other teachers, and which we are trying to address! It is, unfortunately, expensive and time consuming to convert existing sims to HTML5. We're working on it, and redesigning sims in the process to make them even better, but it is a slow process for sure. We have seen successful lessons with two and even sometimes three students sharing one device, which sometimes helps if the school/teacher has limited access to computers or other devices. 

One thing we are learning this year as we have been working with teachers to develop lessons is that some sims fit easily into a unit, while others take quite some time to find a way to integrate it into the existing curricula. One goal for the lessons we are designing now is to create them in such a way so as to align well to certain textbooks. I imagine it would be helpful on the site to search by textbook and see what lesson plans are available that directly connect to which units. 

Thank you so much for your feedback!

Thanks, Alaa. We love this work and its ability to reach so many students and teachers. 

Thanks for watching our video, Kuldip. Glad to hear you are finding the simulations valuable for teaching!