 The FET is a collection of over a hundred interactive simulations for teaching and learning science. We have simulations in physics, chemistry, biology, earth science, and math. The FET was the brainchild of Professor Carl Wyman. He realized early on that you first have to have good tools to be able to hand to good teachers, and he came to me and said, Mike, I've got an idea for a suite of software tools, so let's go do it. It's research-based, so it's drawing from the research literature, and in addition conducting its own research to make effective simulations. It brings together different types of expertise, programming expertise, content expertise, teaching expertise, and education research expertise. One of our main goals is to educate the world. So we give all of our simulations for free, and we provide tools for translators across the world to translate the simulations. One of the main goals of FET is to provide students with an open exploratory environment where they can really engage with the science like a scientist. And through that exploration, discover, cause, and effect relationships. There's no clear way to learn about the behavior of the system than interacting with it and watching how it behaves when you adjust some control. That instant feedback is essential in order to make the connection between that control and the world. An overall goal for the FET project is to help students see how science connects to the world around them. We want it to be recognizable as something in their life, something they've seen like if we're doing a simulation about waves, we want to see a string or dripping water because it looks simple enough that maybe they think, oh yeah, I think I can handle this. It might be kind of like the Apple philosophy, which is make things as simple as possible so that you don't need instructions and you just sit down and you know how to use it. The appearance of the SIM has to be inviting. It can't be intimidating. So we don't want it too cluttered. We don't want too many controls. Experts often carry around these visual mental models of how a system works. We often use those same visual tools and we display them to help students think like experts. So when you make a change, what's the result of that change? There are a number of things that students see when they sit down in front of a simulation. We try to use multiple representations, objects like bicycle pumps, graphs, and pictures of things like molecules. And the reason for that is there are many representations that are very formal, scientific, like formulas or graphs, and those don't always make sense to students intuitively right away. One of our design philosophies is that we try not to overly guide the student. We call it implicit guidance or productive constraints. Give the user just enough freedom to go down a particular path of inquiry. If you give them too many controls, they might go off onto a path of unproductive inquiry where they just can't figure out what this thing is doing. And the student can get lost. Another one of our goals is to have a learning tool that's very flexible. So we'd like the simulation to be usable in lecture. We'd like them to be usable on homework and labs in all kinds of different situations. The other thing I try to do on all FETSIMs is make them a little playful. Put something in there somewhere that's a little tiny bit of humor or something that doesn't look like a standard textbook. You know, walk that fine line between making it exciting and interesting, but not so much so that they're just blowing things up and not learning. We have experts in software development, education, and education research. In addition, we always integrate high school teachers or middle school teachers who are using the simulations with their students. There's this really good give and take of taking the developers' experience in creating software and simulations and user interfaces and the experts' experience in biology, chemistry, and uniting that all together into something that's coherent and hopefully engaging and educational. When we're trying to think up a new simulation, the first thought is, is this suitable for a FETSIM? Does it lend itself to a visual, highly interactive environment? We really look for areas where the simulations can be powerful. Areas where there's dynamic processes or where there's things that are hidden from the students. You want a SIM which produces an exciting, informative visual, but also a visual which has a high degree of interactivity where the user can grab a control and instantly see the reaction of the physical system. You want the student to be leaning forward at the computer and not leaning back just watching. There is a whole careful research trajectory and research enterprise that funds intellectually the development of the simulations. We draw from research across different areas and in addition we conduct our own research so that we're constantly learning about what makes an effective simulation. We draw from research on computer interface design. For instance, it helps when a control is next to the thing that it's controlling. Another area of research that we draw on is student difficulties. There are research groups that are studying student difficulties in physics, chemistry, biology, and we look through that literature to see what student difficulties are around a particular content area. A third area of research we draw from is broadly the research on how people learn. For instance, cognitive overload. When we think about cognitive overload we want to make sure that the simulations are manageable for the students. If the simulation starts up with a lot of things going on for instance, a lot of motion on the screen already occurring then students hesitate to interact. They sit back and they just want to watch. Now one way to fix that is to give the user a sort of graded complexity level where you have an introductory tab that's stripped down to the bare minimum features of the sim. And once they've mastered the first tab they can move on to the second tab and it has more sophisticated controls, more sophisticated behavior. The entire design process for a simulation typically takes two to eight months. The design process starts with identifying the learning goals that we're trying to address with the simulation. So there we really take input from the teachers and the student difficulties that we find in the research. They have a concept that their students are having a hard time getting and they think a simulation would be a good thing. So I'm kind of to narrow the scope to, you know, what's the essence of the message that you want to get across to the students? What's the concept that they're having a really hard time getting? If we aren't careful, it's really easy to say we're going to write a sim about titration and then there's so many topics, nobody's happy. So I help narrow down the learning goals. Then from the learning goals we go on to storyboarding the simulations. We start using things like Illustrator and sometimes just pieces of paper to draw up things that would make it, you know, as much like a simulation as possible without doing the actual development. So we decide what controls we want to have this allow students to vary. We decide on the context in which we're going to design the simulation. There's a simulation that I'm right in the middle of designing that's about light refraction. And in textbooks usually they just draw a beam of light and you have an interface and they show what the beam of light is going to do on the other side. Light isn't just a beam, it's actually a wave. And so we've been going back and forth through all these emails discussing what should the wave representation look like? How wide should the wave be? Should the wave propagate away from the laser since there's a speed of light as a finite speed or should it just instantly appear because that might be easier for students to figure out? After we storyboard the simulation then the program developer starts programming it up. It's kind of a process so we'll see an initial version of a sim we'll discuss it and the team will make changes the developer will go back and program those so we can get a lot of the kinks out before the student interviews. So after we're happy with how the sim is working on the computer then we go on to student interviews. When we bring the students into the interview we have them interact with the simulations in a very open exploratory way. I usually just say go ahead and play around and tell me what you're seeing. If a simulation is working in terms of the interface and usability they usually figure out what it is that they want to do. I can tell students are engaged when they're really trying to figure out what's going on versus just reporting what they see in the sim. A lot of times students will do things that we never expected and as soon as they do we learn something from that and we say okay maybe we need to change this so that students don't get confused by it. If we see after a couple of interviews that something used to be changed we'll change it and then do interviews with the changes. When we can we also like to get classroom testing and get some feedback from actual classroom use that can drive additional changes to the simulation. We wrap up kind of the simulation development process by creating some tips for teachers creating an activity around the simulation and putting it up on the web and posting the learning goals and the main topics. We've made all the simulations so that they're pretty easy to translate and in November last year I published a simulation and within a month there were 20 different languages that the simulation was now running in and I just find that really exciting because it means that not only is it being used around the United States it's being used all over the world. We have a team of really excellent creative individuals all of which are completely dedicated to this project and making everything as good as it can be and really strive for a level of excellence that I haven't seen anywhere else. Our motives are pure. We're not in it to make money. We give everything away. We don't regard it as a profit making venture. It's an educational venture and that's our job.