Media Release | Sep. 28, 2007
UBC Nobel Laureate’s Physics Education Website Nabs International Award
An international contest has given the top prize to a physics education website launched by Nobel laureate Carl Wieman, who joined The University of British Columbia earlier this year to lead the $12 million science education initiative.
The Physics Education Technology Project (PhET) was honored in the fifth annual International Science and Technology Visualization Challenge in the category of interactive media, beating out more than 200 entries from 23 countries on six continents.
Held by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and the journal Science, the contest aims to highlight the importance of images and illustrations in communicating science to the public. Winning entries will appear on the NSF and American Association for the Advancement of Science websites, and in the Sept. 28 issue of Science.
The PhET website offers interactive “virtual” physics experiments that demonstrate real world applications of physics, such as how electricity flows through wires and light bulbs, how the greenhouse effect warms the Earth and what happens in a microwave oven.
PhET, which is available free through the Internet, has become extremely popular among high school, college and university physics teachers and students around the world. More than two million simulations were run on PhET between January and July of this year. The site also makes all simulations available for download and offline use in classrooms and home computers.
Wieman launched PhET in 2002 with US$250,000 of the money he received for winning the 2001 Nobel Prize in physics and the NSF Distinguished Teaching Scholar award. The University of Colorado (CU) at Boulder, where Wieman launched PhET and the Science Education Initiative, also provided funding.
Wieman joined UBC in January 2007 as director of the Carl Wieman Science Education Initiative, a $12 million project to improve undergraduate science education. He continues to serve as director of PhET and the CU Science Education Initiative. For more information and to access the PhET, visit www.cwsei.ubc.ca.
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