Making on-line science course materials easily translatable and accessible worldwide: Challenges and solutions

摘要

The PhET Interactive Simulations Project recently partnered with the Excellence Center of Science and Mathematics Education at King Saud University with the joint goal of making simulations available worldwide. One of the main challenges of this partnership is to make PhET simulations easily translatable so that truly anyone with a computer can use them in their classroom. The PhET project team has created the Translation Utility that allows a person, who is fluent in both English arid another language, to easily translate any of the PhET simulations. This can be done with minimal computer expertise, making the translation process accessible to faculty and teachers. In this presentation we will share solutions to many of the unexpected problems we encountered that would apply in general to on-line scientific course materials including working with a language that is written right-to-left, different character sets, possible misconceptions and various conventions for expressing equations, variables, units and scientific notation.