phetsims/build-an-atom

User suggestion: Increase number of electrons to show second shell is full

Opened this issue · 1 comments

I'm a physics and chemistry teacher at Ballard High School in Seattle and I have a suggestion for improving the Build an Atom PhET sim. I think it would be educational to add one more electron to the "bucket" of electrons so that students can see that the 2nd shell is full when it contains 8 electrons, i.e. when they try to add a 9th electron it gets rejected. Otherwise there's no indication that the 2nd shell is full, like there is with the 1st shell.

This is an interesting suggestion, and it seems like something we could likely accommodate. We can wait to evaluate it as a team when the simulation is next scheduled for republication. Unassigning myself.