About Wave Interference
Make waves with a dripping faucet, audio speaker, or laser! Add a second source to create an interference pattern. Put up a barrier to explore single-slit diffraction and double-slit interference. Experiment with diffraction through elliptical, rectangular, or irregular apertures.
How to play Wave Interference
Everything is hands-on: drag, click and experiment — the simulation reacts instantly. Make waves with a dripping faucet, audio speaker, or laser!
Questions & answers
- What is Wave Interference?
- Wave Interference is a free interactive simulation from PhET Interactive Simulations (University of Colorado Boulder) that you can play right in your browser on crumble.lol — no downloads and no sign-up. Make waves with a dripping faucet, audio speaker, or laser! Add a second source to create an interference pattern.
- What can kids learn from Wave Interference?
- It helps kids explore: make waves with water, sound, and light and see how they are related. design an experiment to measure the speed of the wave. create an interference pattern with two sources, and determine the ways to change the pattern. find points of constructive and destructive interference by eye and by using the detectors. put up a barrier to see how the waves move through one or two slits. what sort of pattern do the slits create? how can you change this pattern? for light, predict the locations of the fringes that appear on the screen using d sin(θ) = mλ. use the tape measure to verify your predictions. explain how the aperture geometry relates to the diffraction pattern. predict how changing the wavelength or aperture size affects the diffraction pattern.
- What age is Wave Interference good for?
- It is designed for elementary school (roughly ages 5–10) up to university, and curious kids outside that range can absolutely enjoy poking around it too.
- Is Wave Interference free to play?
- Yes — Wave Interference is completely free on crumble.lol and runs fully in your browser on computers and tablets.