 That is a collection of over 100 interactive simulations for teaching and learning science. You've got to connect the formula to real life. The easiest way to show the whole class to make sure everyone can see is to have a big FET Sim up on the screen. Sometimes I use FET just as a lecture demonstration, but I find it most effective to use it in conjunction with a question or an activity that actually is giving the students actively thinking about the science and the simulation. One of the things that FET allows that other things don't allow is when something spontaneously comes up in class, I can say, let's test it. The whole point of FET Sim is that it shouldn't be a passive activity. They weren't designed to be watched by students. I learned years ago that even though every faculty member I know loves good demos, the impact of demonstrations on student learning is almost always less than we would hope. Like any lecture approach, you want to turn things over to the class as much as possible. You want to let the students ask the questions. You want to somehow capture some of the interactivity inherent in the FET Sim by tying the FET Sim to a clicker question or some kind of in-class activity that the students involved with intellectually. One way we can get students to actually think about what they're seeing in the simulation is to partner the simulation with clicker questions and peer instruction. We ask students a challenging question and then have them turn to their partners to discuss. They vote, we collect the votes anonymously, and then we can have a kind of whole class discussion. If I'm presenting the FET Sim and telling them how to interpret it, you know and I know that although some of them are getting it, many of them are just pretty much nodding their head. It sort of makes sense what I'm saying. So the clicker questions are an opportunity to just take a pause, let the students think about what they've just seen and try to interpret it, try to make sense of it. For example, I might ask students to predict how something in the simulation will change when I change one of the variables. And then I have them discuss and vote. They get to turn to their neighbor. I often see them pointing at the screen, talking about various different elements of the circuit. Often hopefully referring to current flow or resistance or voltage, but presumably because that's what the circuit is showing. I'll ask students to defend their answers. That potential energy curve is a lot higher, right? We'll get different arguments for different answers. Then we use the FET Sim to either set up or verify the answer that the student is committed to. And you can hear half the audience go, I got it right. And he never tells us if we're wrong or not, because he's like, OK, that's what you think. And then we go to the simulation and boom, we see it right there. And then we're like, oh, wow, that makes sense now. OK, so I was wrong. That's what I love about clickers. Pressing that button is like a little contract. Oh boy, I can't pretend later on I didn't push B because I pushed B and it got recorded. The questions should be fairly difficult. They should be stimulating to the students. So you want to create a question that is not, did you recall something that I just told you? It's generative. Like questions that ask students to think about what will happen next. Yeah, we actually used a few. We were like, what would you predict would happen? And then we would like go to the FET and see what actually did happen. Like what if we change this? What happens to the period of oscillation of a mass on a spring if I increase gravity? A lot of students voted that the period should increase because the spring stretches more and if it stretches more it's somehow tighter so it'll go back and forth. And we show that easily by just clicking on, OK, let's go to Jupiter or let's go to the space shuttle where we turn gravity off and we see that it oscillates the same period. Sometimes I allow the FETs in to answer a clicker question rather than me answering the clicker question. Well, I found one thing that my students really like is to see the evidence. So I'll have the before and after capture on the next slide. Having a simulation really enriches what I can do at the end of the clicker question. So when we're having the follow-up discussion, when things come up I can respond using the simulation or I can have a series of follow-up questions where I'm asking students what would happen if I do this and if I do that. And that can really enrich and deepen the conversation. We have a lot of clicker questions written around the simulations at our website under teacher resources and under each simulation page. But sometimes you need to write your own questions around your own lecture material and teachers wonder where to start. You know, the clicker questions were really created by me going through the learning goals as I decide lecture by lecture, what are the topics we're going to cover and what are the learning goals of those topics and what questions will hit those learning goals. If you look on the simulation page you can find the learning goals for that simulation. That's a great place to start to say which one of these things really aligns with my goals in my lecture today. Then I would play around with a simulation and set up conditions that particularly elicit and sort of focus in on that particular learning objective. So if it has to do with the fact of demonstrating that current isn't used up in a circuit it is a very laudable goal and something that many students don't think to be the case. So set up a condition that would demonstrate that. For instance you could put two identical bulbs in series and stop and before you close the circuit ask students to make a prediction about which bulb do you think is brighter. I often try to put images of the simulation into the question either in the answer or the answer choices. Sometimes I use different setups of the simulation in the answer choices and then the students are asked to distinguish which setup would have a particular behavior. So sometimes I'll ask some questions like for the energy skate park I might have a pie graph with the kinetic energy and the potential energy shown and I'll say if in the next moment the kinetic energy pie piece is getting larger what might the skater be doing and I'd have a picture of the skater and the choices. So you can use Fed as a standard lecture demo but research has shown that student learning is really limited with this approach. The key is to get the students to be the center of the activity and not you so the more show and tell it is the less effective it's likely to be. One way to do this is to use interactive lecture demonstrations similar to those developed by Thornton and Sokolov. Here the instructor poses a scenario and asks students to predict what's going to happen. They write down individually and then they discuss together and form a group opinion. The instructor can then elicit those responses from the student and pull out their reasoning before they essentially conduct the experiment and in this case they conduct the experiment using the simulation. The students can then reflect on what actually happened and the instructor can have a whole class discussion around the science and the reasoning and ideas that were going on. There's this well-known psychological effect that people remember what they expected to see not what they actually saw. If you just show it to them then they're not emotionally and intellectually invested in the answer but if you force them to make a prediction first then they're interested to know is my prediction correct or is my prediction wrong and they're much more likely to remember if they got it wrong if they were forced to commit to the wrong answer and then see it different. For example we've adapted one interactive lecture demonstration to use the moving man simulation. In this case we give students a scenario for instance the man standing still for 5 seconds then walking at a constant speed for 10 seconds and then standing still for another 5 seconds. We ask them to predict how the velocity versus time and position versus time graphs are going to look. One thing that's really useful is that that simulation can allow you to extend what the students can see and enrich the discussions. So for instance I can take the simulation and show the velocity vector at the same time that I'm showing the graph so that you can really help students digest the coordination between the man's movement and the graph. I have total control of the physics in a FET sim where I don't have that control in a real demonstration I can slow down time so that things move slowly enough that I can point out the important features. One of the goals of FET is to really help students develop their science inquiry skills so in all of the FETs you can change variables and discover, cause and effect relationships and you can even do this in a large lecture setting. FET allows you to explore ranges of parameters in wonderful ways. The teacher can be the guide. The teacher can put FET up projected on a screen in front of the class and do a run through of an experiment and then ask the students in the class after they've done the run through for their suggested variations on the experiment. Do you think it would be harder or easier for the water molecules to jump up into the gas? And being the guide the teacher can then input their parameters and see what happens. Ask them to predict first what's going to happen what they expect to happen observe it and see what the result is. And then together we can first collect explanations from the students and then evaluate the reasoning and then we can turn to the simulation and see what actually happens. The FET helps kind of ingrain in our mind what is actually going to happen rather than what we intuitively thought. I'll ask the audience a question. I'm going to turn on friction now. What's going to happen to the total energy? Some of them will cry out, oh total energy will go down cause you'll lose energy to heat. And I go, oh, is energy not conserved when there's friction? And other people will say, oh energy's always conserved but you're losing it to heat. So where is it going? So I flip on the friction and they see the thermal energy bar start going up and they see how the thermal energy bar is added to the potential and kinetic energies to keep the total energy constant. I love that sort of easy, accurate visual and I think the students do too. So the other day in class I used the buoyancy simulation and I made a block that was neutrally buoyant and put it in the water and then I asked students what changes could you make to make this block float? I turned the question out to them. They discussed, they came up with various changes and then we came back together and I had them volunteer their changes and explain their reasoning and actually predict what would change the gravity vector or the buoyancy vector and then we could do that change with the simulation and see what actually happens. That sort of immediate visual is just so much more powerful than telling the students the answer or claiming that the answer can be seen from this formula. So in that way a simulation can really change the nature of a classroom. So you can engage in what I call full class inquiry. So in an laboratory you might have two students engaged in inquiry with one tabletop experiment but in a large lecture you can now have the entire class engage in inquiry with the simulation. In my experience the use of simulations in lecture, no matter how you use them often leads to more high quality student questions and that's the sort of thinking that we want our students to be doing in class. It's a really really good tool for helping kind of with conceptual understanding. Yeah it was helpful because if you got the quicker question wrong and then she showed the fact to explain kind of the concept it was really easy to see how you missed it and help explain it better. 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. And that is a really powerful way to learn. You learn what's important and what's not important. It's one thing to see the professor conduct an experiment or something but it's a totally different thing to see the student generating questions that he has and that he wants to answer. So we'll often see students asking what if questions around the simulation. So what's nice about this is you can kind of go where the kids go. So let's see the sim and they go well this is a solid now what's going to happen what if we do this and you can do that with a fact. So the more interactive the less that you do without somebody from the class generating it suggesting it asking about it the more that it's like they are in control of the sim the more effective it feels at least as an instructor.