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A physics lab your class can open in a browser tab. It is free, there is nothing to set up, and it collects nothing about your pupils.
No licences, no seats, no class codes, no installs, and nothing for your IT department to approve beyond the address itself. Send the link. A pupil who clicks it is running an experiment within a minute, with no account and no email address.
Measuring is free. Every simulator, every instrument and every uncertainty, for ever, with no account — and a pupil can export their data whatever they pay. Writing it up is the paid part: the page guides, the citations, the PDF and Word exports. A whole class can be bought together rather than thirty times over, from £95 a classroom a year, or £650 for the department. The plans are here. Prices exclude VAT, and we raise an invoice against a purchase order — we can take one from March for the following September.
If your sets are nowhere near full, or your sixth form is taught across several classes, ask about per-student pricing instead of per-classroom.
The AI lab partner is the exception: it runs on an account the pupil connects themselves, so the school is never billed for it, and a class that connects nothing still has every simulator and every graph.
Their work is saved in their own browser. There are no analytics, no tracking and no advertising, and their conversations with the lab partner stay on their machine. There is no pupil list for you to manage and no data of theirs for anyone to lose — which is a deliberate design choice and not a missing feature.
The trade is that there is no marking dashboard: you will see your pupils' work the way you always have, as something they hand in. They can export a dataset as CSV, a graph as an image, or the whole write-up as a PDF or a Word file.
It does not replace a practical, and it is not trying to. What a bench is bad at is repetition and scale: eleven lengths of pendulum in a lesson, a half-life you do not have to wait for, a Young modulus experiment taken past the elastic limit without anyone replacing the wire. What a bench is good at — handling the apparatus, and finding out how awkward a real measurement is — this cannot give them.
Where it is strongest is the half of a practical that happens after the data: designing the investigation, propagating uncertainties, choosing the graph that straightens the relationship, and writing it up with the figures and the citations in order.
PhysLab cannot do a practical for a pupil and does not claim to — the manipulation of apparatus is a skill the specifications assess, and a simulation cannot satisfy the practical endorsement. What it can be is the place the record lives: the readings, the uncertainties, the graph, the gradient and the write-up, in one document that exports to PDF and Word. Pearson asks for a contemporaneous record and leaves the format open — “student lab books or practical portfolios” — and this is one.
It is also practice for the part of practical work that is examined on paper, which is a good deal of it: at least 15% of the marks at GCSE and A level, a whole compulsory paper for Cambridge centres. Cambridge 9702 Paper 5 is thirty marks, 11.5% of the A level, weighted entirely to experimental skills, and its first question asks a candidate to design an investigation. The syllabus says it “will not require laboratory facilities”.
36 simulators across 10 branches — Kinematics, Rigid body mechanics, Oscillations, Circuits, Fields, Gases & thermodynamics, Wave behaviour, Light & optics, Materials & fluids, Nuclear & quantum — each with ready-made investigations and a measurable quantity you can plot. Nothing is tied to a named specification, deliberately: the equations are physics, and physics is the same everywhere.
It is instructed to behave like a lab partner rather than an answer machine. It may read a pupil's results and their draft and ask questions about them; it is told, in its instructions and in the description of the tool itself, that it may not write the report. It cannot invent data — to quote a number from an experiment it has to call a tool that reads the pupil's own results. And it is entirely optional: a class that never connects an account loses nothing but the conversation.