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Micro Simulations for Education

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Welcome to the MicroSims for Education website.

A MicroSim (or Micro-Simulation) is a simple animation or simulation program that is quickly generated using generative AI to help teachers explain concepts to students. MicroSims are designed to be generated from a brief description of a problem using generative AI tools such as ChatGPT.

The term MicroSim was coined by Val Lockhart in the summer of 2023 while she was working with generative AI. She found that both teachers and students could generate useful p5.js simulations using GPT-4 with little or no training.

System Prompt Limitations

Although you can create a System Prompt that puts many best practices in the context window of ChatGPT, it is not an ideal solution. A better process is building a customized GPT on curated examples that have a high-quality interface with good user experience design reviews. This is one of the objectives of this website.

The MicroSim Registry

One of our goals on this site is to create a library of MicroSims that can be used to fine-tune a generative AI application. We have found that new GPTs will create higher-quality simulations if they are trained with a high-quality training set. This reflects the fact that although there are tens of thousands of sample p5.js animations, many of them are created by first-time programmers.

Although it is easy for a non-programmer to use generative AI to create a new MicroSim, it is more difficult to find high-quality MicroSims that have been peer-reviewed by senior software developers and user experience designers. These MicroSims have some of the following qualities:

  1. Clearly labeled controls with values. We discourage the use of mouse actions that are unlabeled.
  2. Controls that are placed at the bottom of the simulation. This encourages smartboard use in classrooms.
  3. Controls aligned for visual aesthetics
  4. A machine-readable (yml) description of the MicroSim including subject, topic and UI controls.

How to Use This Site

We provide both a search and navigation system to reach the MicroSims.

Here are some samples to get you started: