science and mathematics simulations educational

To help students engage in science and mathematics through inquiry, simulations are developed using the following design principles:

Encourage scientific inquiry

Provide interactivity

Make the invisible visible

Show visual mental models

Include multiple representations (e.g., object motion, graphs, numbers, etc.)

Use real-world connections

Give users implicit guidance (e.g., by limiting controls) in productive exploration

Create a simulation that can be flexibly used in many educational situations

Several tools in the simulations provide an interactive experience:

Click and drag to interact with simulation features

Use sliders to increase and decrease parameters

Choose between options with radio buttons

Make measurements in your experiments with various instruments – rulers, stop-watches, voltmeters, and thermometers.

As users interact with these tools, they get immediate feedback about the effect of the changes they made. This allows them to investigate cause-and-effect relationships and answer scientific questions through exploration of the simulation.