Hi there,
Four new simulations went live on Sammartano.Science this week. They cover life science, Earth’s oceans and the history of our planet. All of them are free, run in a browser and need no logins.
Photosynthesis Lab. Shine light on a leaf, change the carbon dioxide, water and temperature, and watch it make sugar and oxygen. Students can zoom from the whole plant down into a leaf cell to see the chloroplasts at work. They can run a full day and night cycle, and full sun looks very different from night. It’s a good fit for finding the limiting factor: change one thing at a time and see which one holds the plant back.
Tsunami Lab. Move the sea floor and follow the wave across an ocean basin to the coast, in cross section and on a map. Students measure how the wave slows down and grows taller as the water gets shallow. Then they test different coastlines, warning buoys and seawalls, and compare their trials. There’s a short guided start, five challenges and ready-made teacher demonstrations.
Ocean Currents. Turn a 3D Earth and watch the surface currents move. Release a water parcel and follow where it goes, or slice down through the ocean to see what’s happening below the surface. Students can change what drives the currents (sunlight, wind, salt, Earth’s rotation, even the continents) and see what changes. Six short investigations come built in.
Geologic Time Scale. An interactive timeline of Earth’s history, from 4.6 billion years ago to today. Zoom from eons down to ages, with key events like the first life, mass extinctions and the dinosaurs marked along the way. A one-day clock view puts all of Earth’s history into 24 hours, and guided journeys walk students through the big stories. The dates come from the current international chart.
A reminder about annotations and recording. Every simulation, these four included, has the Annotate and Capture buttons in the toolbar.
Annotate: draw, highlight and label right on top of a sim. The laser pointer and spotlight help you point things out on a projector.
Capture: take a clean screenshot, with your annotations, to drop into a slide or Schoology post. You can also record a video of the sim with your voice and webcam, trim it and add captions, all in the browser. Nothing you record leaves your computer.
These make it easy to film a short walkthrough for absent students, or to have students record themselves explaining what they see.
As always, if you try something in class and it works, or breaks, reply and tell me. Most of these updates started as a note from a teacher. And if you find these tools and resources helpful, consider a small donation to keep the site up and running!
Thanks for reading,
Mike