During hundreds of student interviews, we have seen students engage in productive science-like exploration with PhET Interactive Simulations (sims). Recently we have been working to determine what specific features of PhET sims are necessary to make them effective learning tools. In this study, we compare differences in student learning and sim investigation when the sim either shows or hides r...

We previously demonstrated that observers in multiple object tracking experiments can successfully track targets when all the objects simultaneously vanish for periods lasting several hundred milliseconds (Alvarez, Horowitz, Arsenio, Dimase, and Wolfe, 2005). How do observers do this? Since observers can track objects that move behind occluders (e.g., Scholl and Pylyshyn, 1999), they may treat ...

A tremendous growth of the Internet over the past years together with the growing availability of wireless communication technologies in the wide, local and personal area, and the maturing of miniaturized Internet hardware technologies like tiny web servers has fertilized the emergence of “smart appliances”: wirelessly ad-hoc networked, mobile, autonomous special purpose computing devices, prov...