Putting the pH in PhET

As an educator in the chemistry field, I feel like this article did a lot of things right. Using resources, especially free ones, in the classroom is really important. This one gives you a l... See More

As an educator in the chemistry field, I feel like this article did a lot of things right. Using resources, especially free ones, in the classroom is really important. This one gives you a lot of opportunities as an educator because your students can learn the inner workings of pH, without the safety concerns of acids and bases. One aspect of this article that really made it different from some of the other articles I have read was the integration of the 5E learning cycle. This was really an a-ha moment for me, making me think that all articles should be wrote in this way so educators can relate the ideas back to their classroom. The article goes on to use the 5E learning cycle as a vehicle of inquiry-based practices, having the students use the simulation with no procedural directions to find trends and collect evidence. For the eventual experiment, the article even mentions safety procedures that should be followed in the classroom, which I thought was a nice touch. The only thing that I didn’t like about this article was how much it relied on the technology aspect of the lesson. A lot of schools do not have the technological advantages that others do and it would make this lesson nearly impossible to do, without doing the experiment practically and having all of the safety measures reintroduced. With that being said, the technology aspect of the lesson is very helpful and should be explored as much as it can, and a teacher centered experiment could be implemented if wide scale simulations aren’t available. This article checks every box for me, including but not limited to: technology, inquiry-based learning, and the 5E learning cycle. One take away for me would be to implement the learning cycle more clearly into future lessons like this one. Overall, this article was great, keep up the good work and thank you!! 5/5.