Thermonator: The Matter Maker is an engaging and educational app designed to help users see their own theories about how states of matter change from solids to liquids to gases. By manipulating and animating dots that move and collide into one another, users explore different properties of particles while modeling different states of matter.

Go beyond static drawings with the Thermonator. Control the speed, attraction, bounce, and gravity of yellow and purple dots. Predict what will happen when you remove the divider that separates different dots and watch the fast particles (gas) bump into the slow particles (solid). Change kinetic parameters to understand that temperature is not an amount of stuff, but rather is best treated as the relative speed of particles. The Thermonator also helps users construct the causal agents for phase changes of matter, such as the change of particle speeds after colliding with other particles.

The Thermonator was designed in collaboration with the award-winning FableVision multimedia production studio.

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under grant DRL- 1621299. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

A lesson plan for this app is available at http://short.concord.org/8a