Science – Anek Belbase

Visualizing scientific concepts like magnetism and gravity can be fun, tedious, or somewhere in-between depending on your perspective. For early elementary students, it is probably hard to find a substitute for concrete models that demonstrate scientific concepts – like planetariums or fruit-models to communicate astronomical concepts.

However, digital simulations seem to have become realistic and interactive enough to be a reasonable substitute (even an improvement) over many traditional lab exercises – especially for upper elementary students and beyond (basically students who are well into the “concrete operations” phase and learning “formal operations”). And, the University of Colorado at Boulder has created a comprehensive, user-friendly, and most importantly – free – repository of these virtual models. I came across their site while trying to look for ways to help students visualize electrical circuits without a lot of set-up and clean-up, and have begun to rely on it for my own education. Hope you find it useful!

https://phet.colorado.edu/en/simulations/browse

I’ll admit it – besides “knowing” that tides were caused by the moon’s gravitational pull, I had no idea why tides existed. A science teacher training class forced me to confront this ignorance starting with the simple question – if the moon’s gravitational pull causes tides, why do we have two high tides and two low tides in a day? (the moon’s orbit around the earth takes roughly a month, so tides should basically be dictated by the earth’s rotation – i.e. take 24 hours to go from one high tide to the next).

Digging deeper into the matter, I became pretty frustrated – online resources typically introduced another force (centrifugal force) to explain why the ocean “bulges” towards the moon (and sun, which is another layer in this topic), but it was hard to develop an intuition of how this all works together from the material that I found. Fortunately, people like Ingo Berg exist. His website has an application that finally helped me visualize the forces that shape tides – it might also help your students who need to construct visuals to understand concepts.