 
Hello, I am Jared, welcome to Fun Science
Demos.
Today we are going to be taking a look at
a really neat simulation that Carl Wieman
and his team at PhET
put together and created. PhET is a great
website for science and math education
and we have linked
right into the simulation in our video
description. The big idea today is static
electricity.
But we want to see the simulation closer,
so we are going to zoom in.
Now this is what the site is going to
look like when you first open it.
Through science we have discovered that all
matter is made of positive and negative
charges, and that is what those little
pluses and minuses are. I find that
it overwhelms students to see all the
pluses and minuses right to begin with
so we want to put it into
a scene that they really can relate
to and see,
so I want to remove this wall over here.
So I am going to click the button that
says Remove wall
and it goes away. And I want to remove
the charges just to begin with so the
students
are not overwhelmed so there is a button down
here that says Show no charges.
I click that and boom, now I have
something that really a lot of students
have seen before: a balloon and a sweater.
The site is great because it allows me
to move things around
and ask questions about what is happening.
So I can rub this balloon on the sweater,
I can pull it away and let go, why did
the balloon do that? Well,
to understand why the balloon did that I
have to see the charges;
the positive-negative charges. So I just
need to hit this button,
Show all charges. Boom,
the charges pop open and  it looks different
from when we began. So
let us reset this whole thing. And now I
can see
positive-negative charges on the sweater,
positive-negative charges on the balloon.
Through science we have discovered that some
types of matter lose those negative
charges
easily. So watch what happens to the
negative charges on our sweater
as I rub the balloon over it. Wow, the
balloon is picking up those negative
charges
off of the sweater. So watch what happens
when I pull it away-
all those negative charges are attracted
to all those positive charges left on the
sweater. Opposite charges attract,
I can see it. So I brought it back to how
it looks like when you first open the
site.
You can see we can add a wall, there is
all kinds of other buttons you can press.
We can add a second balloon. There is so
much for you to explore, all you have to do is
click on the link in our video  description
and check it out. Simulations are a
powerful tool
to get kids to ask questions and test to
see if they can answer those questions
even if you do not have the materials to
bring into your classroom. The nice thing
about this simulation is that it will work
on
any device. Science is so cool.
Click on it, play around with it. Ask
questions,
see if you can find the answers. Thanks
for watching.
 
