Interactive Physics Education Laboratory (PhysEd)

George Chin Jr. (Computer Science Dept.)
Wen Gong (Computer Science Dept.)
Ray Reaux (Computer Science Dept.)
Madhan Subhas (Computer Science Dept.)

Project Description:

PhysEd will be an interactive, instructional physics software package that allows high school and first-year college students to experiment will fundamental physics laws and concepts. This project is being developed for the Scientific Visual Analysis with Multimedia (ESM 5984) course at Virginia Tech.

Objectives:

Apply multimedia techniques to develop a novel, highly- interactive system.
Teach the following three fundamental areas of physics: force and motion, oscillation and waves, and electromagnetism.
Provide an exploratory approach whereby students may experiment with physics laws by "tweaking" parameters and visualizing the reactions or results.
Target towards computing facilities typically available to high school and first-year college students.

Allocation of Tasks:

PhysEd will be developed as three separate modules conforming to the three supported physics areas listed above. Assignments of these modules are as follows:

Force and Motion - Wen Gong
Oscillation and Waves - Madhan Subhas & George Chin
Electromagnetism - Ray Reaux

Team members are individually responsible for the development and completion of their assigned modules. Under these assignment, each team member is expected to perform a significant amount of multimedia development.

Development and Target Computing Environment:

We intend to develop both an interactive and a demonstration version of the PhysEd program. The interactive version provides the user with full dynamic control of the experiments. The demonstration version presents the capabilities of PhysEd through text, images, and possibly video, and provides a mechanism for the student to download the interactive version. The two versions of the PhysEd program are briefly described below:

Interactive version will be developed and installed on Macintoshes using the Macromind Director authoring software. Time permitting, we may also port the interactive PhysEd software to the PC environment.
The demonstration version will be developed using HTML and will be available through Mosaic or Netscape.

Other Physics Education Web Sites:

The following list contains links to other web sites which have information related to physics education:

University of Nebraska at Lincoln - Physics Education - Research group in physics education
University Physics II - Workshop Physics - Student resource for second semester physics
Wonders of Physics - Description of a fast-past program of dramatic physics

The Project Dream Team: