Work With Us
Every tool here is unfinished in some way, and the people best placed to say how are the ones using it in a room full of eleven-year-olds. Tell us what a tool should do next. If we build your class's idea, your class is credited on the page. It costs nothing, it never involves student data, and you can stop at any point.
Three ways in
You do not need to be a teacher. Homeschool parents, librarians, museum and planetarium staff, science-club leaders, and people who simply use the site and have a better idea are all equally welcome — the pages have to work for whoever opens them.
What happens after you write
- 1 · You send it. The class request form is the easiest route — what you're teaching, the grade or year group, and what you'd like the tool to do. Rough is fine. "The moon page is too much at once for my third graders" is a real, useful message.
- 2 · A person reads it. Not a queue, not a bot. You get a reply, including when the answer is "that one is beyond what this site can honestly compute".
- 3 · We work out what it really is. Most good ideas arrive as a wish and leave as a specific change. That conversation is the valuable part, and it usually improves the idea.
- 4 · We build it. Small things can be live the same week; a new simulator takes longer. You'll know which one it is before we start.
- 5 · You see it before anyone else does. If it came from your class, you get to tell us it isn't right yet. That is not a formality — a tool that misses the point in a classroom is a tool that failed.
- 6 · The credit goes up. On the page itself, in the same words you approved, for as long as the page exists.
The credit, exactly
If your class's idea gets built, a line like this goes on the tool:
This simulator was inspired by an idea from Mr. Smith's 5th grade class at Paradise Elementary School in Paradise, California.
Real school, real class — mine. Paradise Elementary in Paradise, California is where I went, and Mr. Smith taught my fifth grade class there more than thirty years ago. No class has asked for anything yet, so that line is still only an example of the format; it seemed like the right name to hold the place until a real one takes it.
Imagine being in fifth grade, having an idea, and later finding your class named on a tool that students on the other side of the world are using. That is the whole point of doing it this way. Children who are told their ideas can become real things behave differently towards the next idea they have.
What is published
What is never published
Nothing about a student. Ever. Not a name, not a photograph, not a piece of work, not an email address. Please don't send them — we don't want them, we don't need them, and we delete them if they arrive. The credit is opt-in, and if you change your mind a year later, ask on the report page and it comes down. The whole policy is in the privacy policy and the terms.
Ideas that are easy to say yes to
The site's one hard rule is that everything on it is computed from real motions and real measurements, never typed in from memory and never guessed. That rule decides what can be built, so it is worth knowing before you send an idea. Things that fit:
- "Show it for our town." Anything the sun, moon and tide pages do for a city, they can do for yours.
- "Show it for a date that matters to us." A birthday, a field trip, the day of the eclipse, the first day of school.
- "Make it simpler for younger children." Fewer numbers, bigger type, one idea per screen. Several pages need this and we know it.
- "Let us change something and see what happens." Speeds, distances, dates, tilt. The strongest ideas we've had are all of this shape.
- "Put the two things side by side." Two cities, two dates, two planets. Comparison is where most understanding actually happens.
- "We need it to survive our school network." No sign-in, no plugin, works on a locked-down Chromebook, prints on paper.
And the honest limits: we won't build anything that needs student accounts or collects data about children, anything that depends on a paid data feed we can't keep alive, or anything that would require the site to state as fact something it cannot actually work out. When an idea runs into one of those, we'll say so and explain why, rather than quietly not doing it.
What we can and can't promise
Before you write, it helps to look at
The classroom guide Lesson plans already written Day & night on Earth Sun, Earth & Moon The solar system Gravity & orbits Every planet How the numbers are worked out
A good message names the tool, the age group and the moment in the lesson where it stopped working for you. That is enough to act on.