 The FETN suite of simulations is one of the most carefully thought out simulations that we have employed in our instruction. FETN is the best physics simulation software I've ever encountered. I love the FETN simulations. I find that they're really fun even for me to play with. Generally when I pull out the sim, students get quiet. It's amazing. And then we'll go to the FETN sim to see what the right answer is. It's sort of a different form of participation for the students. They're not just listening to the professor but they're also able to like see something visually happening. I never even knew something like this existed before. It was all on a page and now you could actually see it. You see what's going on like when you connect you know two wires and a battery like and you see the flow of each electron and how electrons affected by resistance and it's it correlates with all of them like you see everything that's what I love about it. I think they're awesome and I encourage a lot of other classes to do it. So FETN is a collection of over a hundred interactive simulations for teaching and learning science. They're all free on the web. You can run them online or you can download them to your computer. We have simulations in physics and chemistry and a growing number in earth science, biology and math. One of the main goals of FETN is to provide students with an open exploratory environment where they can engage with the science content like a scientist. The electric circuit sim is a beautiful sim. It's very satisfying to build a little circuit and have it work and it's got this visual representation that carries a lot of meaning with it that the purely abstract textbook representation doesn't. So in lecture I use FETN in a variety of ways. Sometimes I'm using it just as a demonstration. I've used sims in homeworks. I have used the sims in tutorials where they play basically the role of some experimental equipment. Without having to make a mess so I don't have to like take ice and melt it and do all that we can look first you see it as a solid you know and you see the temperature and then you can turn it into a liquid and you can observe the difference on a micro level that matches pretty well with what they see at the macro level. You should show them to us in class and we can play with them on our own and it just gave us a chance to you know see how everything worked. There's a place where you can go to where they have you know activities and they have them segregated you know physics chemistry age group and that so I looked at the ones that were relevant to me which is chemistry high school and just opened up the worksheets. They have worksheets, they have teacher notes and so I looked at a couple of them and got ideas. In this case I generated a worksheet really based off of what I had seen there and so then I was able to use that and it was really helpful. One of the unique things about FET is that it's research-based. We draw from research across different areas. The fact that it comes from research is really important to me. So we have people who represent each of these key aspects of content, human computer interface, educational research and educational practice all together so that we know in the design of these tools that they are going to have the right models be usable by students. What we look for in terms of learning is students asking questions of the simulation and actually sparking interest in what's going on. So in the years that I've been here I've learned a lot of really interesting things about how to make things playful and yet still keep people engaged and learning from it. They spend a lot of time testing, beta testing and revising with students and there's no substitute for that. There's a lot of sims on the internet and you're not always sure that they got the physics right and with FET sims there's so much care that goes into each sim that this is not an issue. It's clear to me that the FET development team really sweats the details and so a novice might look at the motion of the molecules in the gas law applet. I turn up the temperature and they'll notice that the molecules are moving faster whereas somebody with a little more physics knowledge will also notice oh look at that there's also rotational motion as well as the translational motion of the molecules. I'm very visual. I always picture the molecules bouncing around in that and that's really how I think about what's happening in a system so I find that FETs match very well with the way I visualize what's happening in a system. I can show them what's in my head. There are other FET sims that are making physics representations make more sense like when you turn on the force arrows. Some of them are making the invisible visible the charges the electric field lines. In the case of questions about circuits the whole point is to get the students having some intuitive understanding of how the electrons are flowing through the wires. In a real circuit they can only infer that electrons are flowing through wires by the brightness of the bulbs but in the FET sims they can see the electrons. It really helped me visualize it without having to do an actual experiment I could see what was going on. With electromagnetic waves we had a really hard time with the idea that the electric field was everywhere in space but the simulation just showed it beautifully so they were able to go back and forth between the graphical representation and the field picture in space with the simulation. That's sort of immediate visual it's just so much more powerful than telling the students the answer or claiming that the answer can be seen from this formula. You've got to connect the formula to real life and the easiest way to show the whole class to make sure everyone can see is to put a big FET sim up on the screen. Simulations allow you to go beyond what you can do in real life quickly. Using computer simulations we can slow down time. We can dive inside and add them. FET allows you to pause it in the middle and see what the wave equation is at this point or see the velocity at the peak of the ball's motion. We can provide instantaneous feedback to students on what the impact is if we change planets or gravitational fields or time or the number of coils on a wire and see immediately what the impact of these are. We really want to make things intuitive enough in terms of user interface so that when students sit down they don't really need instructions in order to know how to use the simulation. FET is the iPod of educational software. When you pick up an iPod all you hear is music. You're not focused on the controls of the iPod you're focused on the music and when students use a FET simulation they're focused on the physics. Not how do I run this simulation? That's all been made very simple. It takes you about a minute or two to sit down and figure out all that it can do and actually start learning from it like right off the bat. We see a lot of equations and it helps take these equations and kind of give them life and see like if we increase the wavelength what is that going to do? The idea of an open workspace allows us then to encourage students to mess about, to make sense of the world. What happens when I put a light bulb or a battery in here? What happens when I put a pencil into this circuit? One of the things that FET allows that other things don't allow is when something spontaneously comes up in class and I can say let's test it. We developed a saying in physics three let's FET it out like some of us would disagree and like we would like well let's just check the FET. But what you can do in FET is set a bunch of parameters and vary one of them see what happens then make one change in a different parameter and vary the first one again. That is a really powerful way to learn. You learn what's important and what's not important. I think FET definitely provides real-world examples things that in the classroom you can't see or get your hands on at all. We make the simulations highly interactive so that when students move a slider or create a different setting they get immediate feedback as to the effect of making that change. I've never heard a student give me negative feedback about a FET student. They're a lot of fun you know when whether it's you know shooting pianos out of cannons or doing quantum mechanics tunneling. Just they're kind of weird in a way I mean they're funny you know they're not really dry you know the guy has a personality he's bouncing against the walls. Make them a little playful put something in there somewhere that's a little tiny bit of humor or a little joke or something that doesn't look like a standard textbook. Get you interested in it and then once you're interested in it it's really easy to learn it and just want to actually do it and explore it. Two thumbs up for FET. I think and as a matter of fact I know that there has been a positive response all the way from other countries all the way back here to CU Boulder so that demonstrates to me that the impact of the FET applets right now is worldwide which is a remarkable thing. One of our main goals is to educate the world so we give away all of our simulations for free and we provide tools for translators across the world to translate the simulations. The most important thing to me personally is that we're helping to educate the next generation of people. I think we're enabling a lot more people to learn physics and chemistry and biology in a way that will that will stick in their minds and hopefully they'll have these creative visualizations in their minds that will enable them to do great things with understanding of knowledge that the previous generation didn't have as much of an opportunity to learn. They're flexible and easy to use and they capture the interest of my students and my interest as well. I love being on this project. There are very few things in my job that are as rewarding as being at a conference where there are a lot of teachers and they come up to me and say we love FET. I think lots of science teachers should use FET. I think they would really see that students enjoy science more. I just think the the enjoyment addition that physical lab equipment sometimes can't provide. As a future teacher I don't see how somebody could pass up a great tool like this.