PhET Sims are now available in HTML5 as well!

Simulations can be sorted by subject area or grade. This is very helpful.

PhET is a collection of interactive computer simulations for teaching and learning physics, chemistry, math, and other sciences.

Simulations can be used directly on the site or downloaded and used that way.

The simulations are animated, interactive, and game-like environments where students learn through exploration. They emphasize the connections between real-life and the underlying science. These great activities help students visualize abstract concepts!

From drinking fountains at playgrounds, water systems in homes, and working bathrooms at schools to hydraulic bridges and levee systems, fluid mechanics are an essential part of daily life. Fluid mechanics, the study of how forces are applied to fluids, is outlined in this unit as a sequence of two lessons and three corresponding activities. The first lesson provides a basic introduction to Pascal's law, Archimedes' principle and Bernoulli's principle and presents fundamental definitions, equations and problems to solve with students, as well as engineering applications. The second lesson provides a basic introduction to above-ground storage tanks, their pervasive use in the Houston Ship Channel, and different types of storage tank failure in major storms and hurricanes. The unit concludes with students applying what they have learned to determine the stability of individual above-ground storage tanks given specific storm conditions so they can analyze their stability in changing storm conditions, followed by a project to design their own storage tanks to address the issues of uplift, displacement and buckling in storm conditions.

Explore how plates move on the surface of the earth. Change temperature, composition, and thickness of plates. Discover how to create new mountains, volcanoes, or oceans!

Students learn about population density within environments and ecosystems. They determine the density of a population and think about why population density and distribution information is useful to engineers for city planning and design as well as for resource allocation.

Students are presented with a challenge question that they must answer with scientific and mathematical reasoning. The challenge question is: "You have a large rock on a boat that is floating in a pond. You throw the rock overboard and it sinks to the bottom of the pond. Does the water level in the pond rise, drop or remain the same?" Students observe Archimedes' principle in action in this model recreation of the challenge question when a toy boat is placed in a container of water and a rock is placed on the floating boat. Students use terminology learned in the classroom as well as critical thinking skills to derive equations needed to answer this question.

Students build a saltwater circuit, which is an electrical circuit that uses saltwater as part of the circuit. Students investigate the conductivity of saltwater, and develop an understanding of how the amount of salt in a solution impacts how much electrical current flows through the circuit. They learn about one real-world application of a saltwater circuit — as a desalination plant tool to test for the removal of salt from ocean water.

Every week Science North will provide Grade 8 teachers with a pre-recorded video and printable resource.

Teachers will be able to share these YouTube videos and resources with students weekly.

Included are classroom videos, student handouts, and offline lesson plans.

These videos and handouts can be sent to students to provide them with key concepts and activities that link to the curriculum.

Student teams are challenged to evaluate the design of several liquid soaps to answer the question, “Which soap is the best?” Through two simple teacher class demonstrations and the activity investigation, students learn about surface tension and how it is measured, the properties of surfactants (soaps), and how surfactants change the surface properties of liquids. As they evaluate the engineering design of real-world products (different liquid dish washing soap brands), students see the range of design constraints such as cost, reliability, effectiveness and environmental impact. By investigating the critical micelle concentration of various soaps, students determine which requires less volume to be an effective cleaning agent, factors related to both the cost and environmental impact of the surfactant. By investigating the minimum surface tension of the soap, students determine which dissolves dirt and oil most effectively and thus cleans with the least effort. Students evaluate these competing criteria and make their own determination as to which of five liquid soaps make the “best” soap, giving their own evidence and scientific reasoning. They make the connection between gathered data and the real-world experience in using these liquid soaps.

Students review what they know about the 20 major bones in the human body (names, shapes, functions, locations, as learned in the associated lesson) and the concept of density (mass per unit of volume). Then student pairs calculate the densities for different bones from a disarticulated human skeleton model of fabricated bones, making measurements via triple-beam balance (for mass) and water displacement (for volume). All groups share their results with the class in order to collectively determine the densities for every major bone in the body. This activity prepares students for the next activity, "Can It Support You? No Bones about It," during which they act as biomedical engineers and design artificial bones, which requires them to find materials of suitable density to perform as human body implants.

In this activity, the students will apply the concepts they learned regarding mass, volume and density in the previous activities to design a boat.

In this experiment, students create a "lava lamp" - a beaker on a hotplate, and investigate buoyancy, convection and other fluid and thermodynamic properties using ink, water, vegetable oil and Alka-Seltzer tablets. The activity is from PUMAS - Practical Uses of Math and Science - a collection of brief examples created by scientists and engineers showing how math and science topics taught in K-12 classes have real world applications.

This resource uses text, images, maps and a laboratory exercise to explain how differences in the temperature and salinity of ocean water cause the formation of deep-ocean currents. It is part of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's "Ocean Surface Topography from Space" website. This material is also available on the "Visit to An Ocean Planet" CD-ROM.

Students use modeling clay, a material that is denser than water and thus ordinarily sinks in water, to discover the principle of buoyancy. They begin by designing and building boats out of clay that will float in water, and then refine their designs so that their boats will carry as great a load (metal washers) as possible. Building a clay boat to hold as much weight as possible is an engineering design problem. Next, they compare amount of water displaced by a lump of clay that sinks to the amount of water displaced by the same lump of clay when it is shaped so as to float. Determining the masses of the displaced water allows them to arrive at Archimedes' principle, whereby the mass of the displaced water equals the mass of the floating clay boat.

Students will investigate different phases of and properties of matter, including mass, volume, density, solubility, and conservation.

Expanding on the topic of objects in motion covering Newton's laws of motion, acceleration and velocity, which are taught starting in third grade, students are introduced to new concepts of speed, density, level of service (LOS) (quality of roadways), delay and congestion. Every day we are affected by congestion even if we do not step out of our homes. For example, the price we pay for goods increases due to increases in shipping costs caused by congestion delays. A congestion metric would help us to compare roadways and assess improvement methods. A common metric used to measure congestion is called level of service (LOS).