Gas pressure in a syringe: volume, temperature and particles sim
The student squeezes a sealed syringe of air and heats it in a water bath, reads the pressure gauge, fills the tables and finds Boyle's law and absolute zero from graphs of their own readings.
Kinetic particle model of matter (also Chemistry C2) · covers the O-Level, IGCSE, GCSE topic
What the sim shows
Particle view: 30 particles stand for vastly many · slowed · not to scale
Use it in your lessons
- Try it here: anyone can unlock 2 figures free, and a free account unlocks up to 5. Runs on a laptop, a Chromebook or a phone; nothing to install.
- Present it and share student links with the teacher plan, from US$5 a month, billed yearly.
- Put it on your own website or LMS for US$9, paid once, or every sim from US$29 a month.
Free guide: 12 practicals as sims, and how to run one in a lesson →
Need a version for your exact set-up? Have one made: US$49 a figure in an order of 5.
More physics sims
- Refraction through a rectangular glass block simSet a ray box or pins, mark the ray, measure i and r with a protractor, and find n from the gradient of sin i against sin r.
- Black-body radiation: temperature and colour simTurn up the supply to a lamp and watch its filament go from giving out only infrared to dull red, orange, yellow and yellowish white while its emission curve's peak moves to shorter wavelengths and its total power climbs; then warm a black or shiny can in a lamp's light until it absorbs as fast as it gives out, and see the same balance set the Earth's temperature.
- Charge flow and current simClose the switch on a real series loop and watch the lamp light at once while every ammeter reads the same; drag a magnifier over any lead to see the electrons drift from − to + against the conventional current, time a run, work out Q = I × t yourself (✗ reasons for mA and ms) and check it against a coulomb counter.
- Combining resistors simDrag real resistors into the clips of a resistance board to wire them in series or in parallel, measure V and I with real digital meters, work out R = V ÷ I from your own readings and check it against the series and parallel formulas, and see that adding a parallel branch lowers the total while adding in series raises it.
- Efficiency: a motor lifting a load simSet the supply's voltage and the load, then time a small geared motor winding a slotted-mass load up beside a half-metre rule: read the energy in from a joulemeter (or V × I × t), work out the useful energy m g Δh and the efficiency, watch a Sankey diagram of where the energy went draw itself, and plot how the efficiency changes with the load.
- Electric field patterns simSwitch on an EHT supply joined to electrodes in a dish of castor oil and watch semolina grains line up into the field pattern of a point, a charged sphere, two points or two parallel plates; drag the electrodes, show field lines running from + to −, and drop in a small + or − test charge to see the force on it.