 I'm Carl Wyman, founder of the FET Interactive Simulation Project at the University of Colorado in Boulder. The beginning of FET really goes back to the around 1990 or so, and I was working with Marty Goldman on a project he had called Physics 2000, and in that I got introduced to the idea of these online interactive simulations. At that point I developed them to explain my research in laser cooling and Bose-Einstein condensation. But as I gave talks on this all over the world in different settings, I discovered these simulations were really quite amazing compared to any other teaching tool I had in that they seemed to work very well, were very engaging, people learned a lot from them. Whether these people were physics professors at a colloquium or middle school students, and I knew that no other educational material or presentation worked anywhere near like that. And so I kept thinking about how to incorporate that into teaching more widely, and then I won a NSF Distinguished Teaching Award that gave some money to get started, and almost very soon after that I got the Nobel Prize, and that also put a bunch more money into it. And so then I could go ahead and start to hire the teams of people that was really necessary to develop and test sophisticated interactive simulations like that, and I was lucky enough to get very good people and things just took off from there. From the very beginning, the goal of that was to be the most broadly useful tool, and so we designed it so it could be used by teachers in the classroom as a lecture tool, but then it also could be something that students could go home, work with or in their own, be part of their homework problems, or just be used in informal science education. And so from the beginning we really wanted to make this a technology that could fill as many niches as possible in the educational needs. And I think we succeeded quite well in that if you look at how it's being used. What I think makes that unique is it's really based on research on learning, and it embodies the expertise of scientists, science research educators, and very high level software engineers to make sure we've built that research on learning and tested it very carefully with students so that it really will be effective when used. One of the tremendously powerful things about the FET interactive simulations is that they are so highly interactive. The students really controlling what's going on and learning from it, not just watching something. And in addition, they make the invisible atoms, light, etc. visible so they can investigate and discover these things for themselves. It gives them a whole different perspective about science. It's not just then some magical mysterious thing that you're just cramming to memorize a bunch of facts for. It's something that everyone can really understand, and you can see how it affects your world. It really changes people's whole perceptions of thinking about and learning science. By changing learners' views of science, it also makes a lot more of them realize they can be scientists, they could do science who otherwise would never be thinking along those lines. This is important across the entire population. I'm particularly concerned with those groups who are quite underrepresented in science right now. When I first started with FET, I didn't really have nearly the grand vision it's turned into. I just saw lots of opportunities to use these in classes that I was teaching, other people were teaching, that I thought, gee, this would make it a lot easier to understand the material and make it a lot more interesting. It can do a better job of showing students how this relates to the real world around them. I've been amazed to see actually the growth of FET over the past 10 years, both as it expands into new areas of science, but most importantly, how widely it's being used from college levels now down to grade schools and in countries all over the world.