1.1 Introduction to phetsims

PhET Interactive Simulations creates free, open source educational simulations in science and math, which you can find at the PhET website. This document explains PhET’s libraries, practices and patterns for developing interactive simulations in HTML5. This document is also available at https://github.com/phetsims/phet-info/blob/master/doc/phet-development-overview.md. For discussion and feedback, please visit the Developing Interactive Simulations in HTML5 Google Group.

Question: What’s the point of these simulations? What are they to begin with?

Answer: These simulations serve as explorable explanations to a plethora of concepts in Math and Science. In this documentation, you will be able to learn the steps a novice developer needs to take to develop a simulation of their own. For the purpose of demonstration, we will be developing a simulation for Newton Raphson method.

 

Question: What do you mean by "explorable explanations"?

Answer: An explorable explanation is a sort of instructive media in which an interactive computer simulation of a particular idea is supplied to propose methods in which the public might learn. Explorable reasons urge users to find out things about the concept and evaluate their behavioral expectations against their real conduct by encouraging a more active type of learning than reading and listening.

Citation: PhET Interactive Simulations. They can be found here at: https://github.com/phetsims
Available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).