Physics teaching tools

This will be a hit with younger students. Gravity Lab another app from Urban Sedlar allows you to create your own universe, simulate the collision of massive bodies to explain how momentum is conserved, and see how the first two of Kepler's Three Laws of planetary motion work.

This is the best tool to understand more about physics and how gravity affects the universe. It's a fun application to use and it clearly explains the laws of gravity. SimplePhysics by Jundroo, LLC lets you build anything from bridges to Ferris wheels and make sure they're strong enough.

This app allows you to model a structure and test whether it's tough enough to withstand external forces. Structural areas affected by immense strain are marked in red, which gives you a chance to fix your design. Also, you can test your structure by blowing it up or smashing it. SimplePhysics is effective for learning more about the basics of structural engineering. Our technologies may evolve, but some things never change!

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Prepaid orders only. Restrictions apply. What The Heck Happened?!?! Search Submit. Physics Classroom Supplies Respect the Laws of Physics, please, by utilizing these fun and informative demos. Could the Magnetic Accelerator be the basis of a perpetual motion machine? Great for open-ended discovery. Perfect for teaching your students about Newton's laws of motion, Newton's Cradle makes a great addition to any classroom. Constructed from a single strand of thin, flexible metal, the Flow Ring is both a kinetic sculpture and a mesmerizing flow toy.

Our Blast Off! Gyros and tops a spin and explore the forces of rotational momentum and gyroscopic stability. Give Euler's Disk a spin and observe the hypnotic display of light and continually changing sound. The Squiggle Ball has amazing abilities to navigate out of corners, even simple mazes! Compatible with: iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad.

Requires: iOs 4. Vernier Video Physics:. Kinematics, an exciting topic in Physics, is the study of the motion of objects using words, equations, graphs , diagrams and numbers. Vernier Video Physics helps you learn K inematics with ease. Take a video of an object in motion, mark its position frame by frame, and set up the scale using a known distance, then this app will draw its trajectory, position, and velocity graphs. It also allows you to share these data with others.

Compatible with: iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. Requires: iOs 6. Particle Zoo:. The scientist does not study nature because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in it, and he delights in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing, and if nature were not worth knowing, life would not be worth living. Particle physics is the study of the nature of particles that are the constituents of what is usually referred to as matter and radiation.

This app helps students understand the basic concepts of particle physics. It feels frustrating when I have to use proprietary tools since I cannot understand their inner workings. Having grown up professionally in such an environment, open source has been my go-to solution for all the software I use. When I became the regular teacher of the Physics and Biophysics course at the medical school at my university , I decided to use only open source software to prepare my lectures.

Here is my experience so far and the solutions I found. Teaching is not easy. You should first understand the subject and then figure out how to communicate with somebody that knows nothing about the subject; therefore, it is of paramount importance to study the subject in depth and prepare the lectures well in advance.

There are countless books about physics, but there are also some interesting, freely available resources. Most of these do not count as open source, as they cannot be modified, but they are useful anyways. Before preparing my support material, I had to decide whether I preferred to use the blackboard or slideshows during the lectures.

I opted to use both with the idea of showing hard-to-draw graphics in the slideshows and writing down equations on the blackboard. Eventually, the slideshows became much more prevalent. I use them as the draft of my lecture, helping me to keep track of what I want to say.

I also added the mathematical proofs that I want to show to have a correct reference during the lecture. Instead of using a blackboard, I ended up using a graphics tablet for all the notes I write during the lectures. I use the tablet for three main purposes: to draw additional drawings to explain myself better, to write down equations and proofs, and to write down the key messages that I want my students to remember. Even if what I write is already on the slideshows, actually writing it by hand during the lectures gives the students the time to write it down in their notes.

After the lectures, I share, on my website, both the slideshows and my notes. Figure: Example of notes taken during class with the graphics tablet and Krita. Since math is the language of physics, I needed a practical way to write down equations in my slideshows. Probably, the best tool for that is LaTeX , but it was designed to typeset books and not slides. Luckily, there is the Beamer class that allows you to typeset slideshows with LaTeX.

The resulting file is a very portable PDF. The layout is nice and clean and forces me not to overstuff each slide. From the same source code, I can prepare two versions of the file. I have also seen students taking notes directly on the PDFs of the handouts on their tablets and computers.

The only drawback of using LaTeX and Beamer is the impossibility of embedding videos in the produced presentation. I, therefore, have to keep as a separate file the occasional videos that I show during class. Something that I am careful about is the licensing of the graphics I use. As such, I never use graphics that do not allow me to redistribute my modifications.

I drew most of the images in my slideshows. I use the exceptional Inkscape for my vector graphics. When I need a 3D looking diagram, I use Blender to draw the scene; then I trace the rendered image with Inkscape to convert it to vectorial. I recently discovered FreeCAD , which has the striking feature that it can directly export the 3D scene to some vectorial format. I can then adjust the image with Inkscape without having to trace the raster image. In all my diagrams, I am trying to keep a consistent look, and therefore I limit myself to a color palette , both from d3 and matplotlib.