Show the Physics

This is amazing, they treat demos as mini-inquiries: predict → observe → explain. I’d like to spin up open, libraries for chemistry and biology with the same spirit (prediction prompts, low-cost kits, failure modes, disposal notes, and paired sims/datasets for no-lab classrooms). If you’ve got experience running Shakhashiri-style demos, PhET-like sims, or school lab safety, jump in—let’s draft the minimal spec and seed the first 10 experiments.

Several years ago, I spearheaded an effort to just take the PhET sims and get them into an online school’s physics and chemistry curriculum (without even doing any development of new sims, I was trying to keep the cost close to zero).

It was like pulling teeth. Folks in education are highly skeptical of these kinds of things unless you can show hard evidence of their efficacy (which is fair, we shouldn’t be afraid of having our methods evaluated). But as much as this kind of simulation-based learning feels like it should be better, in practice it’s difficult to actually demonstrate that it is. If you’re lucky, you get to train some teachers ahead of time, do an A/B test, get back the results, and it’s a non-statistically-significant mess. In the end, my PhET efforts got crunched in the gears as the curriculum updates I was building them into got cancelled for other budgetary reasons.

I still believe these kinds of tools must be good for something, it feels ridiculous to think they aren’t. But one hazard I have definitely observed: People who already know the concepts being taught tend to love these things for the elegant way they demonstrate the principles, but actual learners who don’t know the concepts yet don’t always feel the same way.