PhET Interactive Simulations
Screenshot of PhET's Circuit Construction Kit Simulation | |
Type of site | Online education |
|---|---|
| Available in | English, Afrikaans, Arabic, Bengali, Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Marathi, Norwegian, Odia, Persian, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Thai, Turkish, Uzbek Vietnamese |
| Created by | Carl Wieman |
| URL | phet |
| Commercial | No |
| Launched | 2002 |
Content license | Creative Commons (CC-BY) |
PhET Interactive Simulations, a project at the University of Colorado Boulder, is a non-profit open educational resource project that creates and hosts explorable explanations. It was founded in 2002 by Nobel Laureate Carl Wieman. PhET began with Wieman's vision to improve the way science is taught and learned. Their stated mission is "To advance science and math literacy and education worldwide through free interactive simulations."
The project acronym "PhET" originally stood for "Physics Education Technology," but PhET soon expanded to other disciplines. The project now designs, develops, and releases over 125 free interactive simulations for educational use in the fields of physics, chemistry, biology, earth science, and mathematics. The simulations have been translated into over 121 different languages, including Spanish, Chinese, German, and Arabic; and in 2011, the PhET website received over 25 million visitors.
In October 2011, PhET Interactive Simulations was chosen as the 2011 Microsoft Education Tech Award laureate. The Tech Awards, presented by The Tech Museum of Innovation, honor innovators from around the world for technology benefitting humanity.