 So FED 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 FED is to provide students with an open exploratory environment where they can really engage with the science content like a scientist. I love the FED simulations. I find that they're really fun even for me to play with. Before it was all on a page and now you can actually see it. You see what's going on when you connect two wires and a battery and you see the flow of each electron and how electrons affected by resistance and you see everything. That's what I love about it. One way that I use simulations is I ask clicker questions around them to really focus what students are thinking about and trying to process. Sometimes I'm using it as a demonstration as a really effective way to describe a dynamic system to the students. 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 take ice and melt it and do all that, we can look, first you see it as a solid 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 show them to us in class and we play with them on our own and it just gave us a chance to see how everything worked. One of the unique things about FED is that it's research-based both in its design of the simulations we draw from research across different areas. They spend a lot of time testing, beta testing, and revising with students and there's no substitute for that. 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 the system so I find that FEDs match very well with the way I visualize what's happening in the system. I can show them what's in my head. In a real circuit they can only infer that electrons are flowing through wires by the brightness of the bulbs but in FED's sense they can see the electrons. One of the things that FED allows that other things don't allow is when something spontaneously comes up in class and I can say let's test it. What happens when I put a light bulb or a battery in here? What happens when I put a pencil into this circuit? 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. That is a really powerful way to learn. You learn what's important and what's not important. We developed a saying in Physics 3, let's fed it out. Some of us would disagree and we were like well let's just check the FED. 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. I think FED definitely provides real world examples. Things that in the classroom you can't see or get your hands on at all. 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. And when students use a FED 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. I've never heard a student give me negative feedback about a FED simulation. They're a lot of fun you know when whether it's shooting pianos out of cannons or doing quantum mechanics tunneling. It gets 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. One of our main goals is to educate the world. We give away all of our simulations for free and we provide tools for translators across the world to translate the simulations. The impact of the FED applets right now is worldwide which is a remarkable thing. I think we're enabling a lot more people to learn physics and chemistry and biology in a way 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. As a future teacher I don't see how somebody could pass up a great tool like this.