TPT WebSights column draft for February, 2009:

WebSights features announcements and reviews of select sites of interest to physics teachers. All sites are copyright by their authors. This column is available as a web page at http://PhysicsEd.BuffaloState.Edu/pubs/WebSights/.

If you have successfully used a physics website that you feel is outstanding and appropriate for WebSights, please email me the URL and describe how you use it to teach or learn physics. macisadl@buffalostate.edu.

Some Mechanics Simulation Games: PHUN, World of Goo and LineRider

PHUN http://www.phunland.com/ advertises itself as a "2D physics sandbox" and a "playful synergy of science and art." I'd describe PHUN as a freeware (for non-commercial use) mechanical modeling environment --think something like a subset of Interactive Physics. Available in versions for Windows, Linux and MacOS, PHUN was developed by Emil Ernerfeldt as his master's thesis project in Computing Science at Sweden's Umeå University. There is quite the PHUN following online, with over 1000 YouTube videos available.

World of Goo http://www.beanstalkgames.com/ is an inexpensive, imaginative, humorous, and nonviolent puzzle-solving WiiWare, Windows PC, MacOS and Linux videogame I'd describe as Dr. Seuss meets Tim Burton's Beetlejuice or A Nightmare Before Christmas (with a soundtrack reminiscent of Danny Elfman). Players solve puzzles by constructing structures, machines and devices from animated talking, living, squirming globs of goo, which of course have their own agenda. The game is darkly ironic and vaguely reminiscent of Lemmings, and there are free demo versions for Wiiware, MacOS and Windows with a Linux version in process.

Line Rider http://linerider.com/ is built around a simple idea: sketch a simple line with a pencil drawing tool, then release a tiny sled rider to ride the line. Created by Boštjan Cadež, a Slovenian university student, Line Rider is freely available on the web -- where again, an online community of aficionados have shared over 11,000 (!) YouTube videos of our tiny tobogganist running through intricate art with various background soundtracks. The simple, original Line Rider is still freely available for web browser play, though for-pay versions are available for wireless phones, iPods, Wii, DS and Windows PCs.

These games are all marvelous fun and represent important motivational hooks for attracting and retaining physics students, but they are ultimately games. Existing free and commercial physics simulation software like the PhET Simulators free from http://phet.colorado.edu and Interactive Physics with free demos at http://www.design-simulation.com/IP/ are written from the ground-up for physics instruction, in many cases by physics educators and by Physics Education Researchers or those guided by Physics Education Research. For example, I like to use Interactive Physics to make the invisible visible when I teach projectile motion by constructing simple visualizations that show animated free body diagrams with force and velocity vectors in which the vector components and sum of velocity change length and direction, with numeric readouts attached to the vectors. PHUN, World of Goo and Line Rider are great entertainment, but not a substitute for well thought out physics teaching software such as the PhET simulations and Interactive Physics. Both the PhET simulators and Interactive Physics have extensive collections of instructor written and tested physics teaching lessons plans, activities, worksheets, simulations, movies etc available from their respective web sites.

PHUN was suggested by Mr. Larry Hiller of North Tonawanda HS Physics; World of Goo by Dr. David Abbott of Buffalo State College Physics, and LineRider by the editor.

Math and Middle School Girls

Recently a PHYS-L contributor pointed out a website by a popular young actress that featured two books on middle school mathematics for middle school girls. Kiss My Math: Showing Pre-Algebra Who's Boss and Math Doesn't Suck: How to Survive Middle School Math Without Losing Your Mind or Breaking a Nail, both by Danica McKellar. McKeller has also written a paper on percolation theory available from http://danicamckellar.com/math/percolation.pdf McKellar's books are not great insightful teaching reference works (the grade school mathematics equivalent of Arons's Teaching Introductory Physics may be the Van de Walle series http://www.ablongman.com/vandewalleseries/ ) but these do look promising and motivational for the intended adolescent girl audience.

Suggested by Brian Whatcott via PHYS-L, http://physicsed.buffalostate.edu/PHYS-L/

Online Video Math and Physics Tutorials from YouTube.com and KhanAcademy.org

Otherwise in online mathematics tutoring, there are a number of noteworthy mathematics tutoring video collections freely available from YouTube. A squidoo page presents an overview at http://www.squidoo.com/Youtube-Math-Tutors and much of this material is grade school math and physics-related, with some explicit physics content, e.g. the Khan Academy's Physics at http://khanacademy.org/ lists some eighty (!) short video vignettes. This is both useful fodder for review and a pretty fascinating movement in math that could be further applied to physics problem solving (obviously demonstrated at a barebones level by the Khan Academy folk). These short problem solving videos by professional tutors (not physicists) are exquisitely reductionist and incomplete in their nature, and don't provide the grand unifying themes that this editor believes actually represent physics as science, but could be of considerable help to students struggling with specific problem solving skills. On the Khan Academy site considerable attention is paid to arithmetic, pre-algebra, algebra, geometry, probability, trigonometry, finance, pre-calculus, calculus, differential equations, linear algebra, finance, SAT preparation and more. It'd be nice to see this approach furthered by physics educators including for higher level courses and vetted for content errors.

The editor, who vaguely believes he recalls a citation to Khan Academy in The Economist.