[Webpub] Adobe Flash Physics Simulations

[Susan MacPhee]

Adobe Boston User Group meeting this Thursday, April 19. 

Title: Flash Physics Simulations

Speakers:
James Battat, Harvard University
Aaron Gibralter, Harvard University

Thursday, April 19, 2007
7:00-9:00 PM

MIT Stata Building
AKA Building 32,
on this map:
http://whereis.mit.edu/map-jpg
Room: 32-141

Abstract:

As part of a Harvard Presidential Instructional Technology Fellowship (PITF)
summer project we developed a suite of interactive mechanical physics
simulations for a course on Mechanical Systems. Physical systems can exhibit
complex behavior. With the use of computer simulations, it is possible to
teach students about the nature of these systems without trudging through
complicated differential equations. We found that several canned animations
demonstrating physical phenomena existed on the web, but we noticed a
surprising lack of full-up interactive physics simulation engines in Flash.
We aimed to fill that void by developing a virtual physics lab using Flash
(ActionScript 2.0). We modeled our work on the open-source Java project at
www.MyPhysicsLab.com.

We'll tell you about our class-based project, demo our simulations, and
explain how various components of our software (e.g. a graphing package)
could be useful to other projects. In addition, we encourage you to use
and/or further develop this software. The interactive simulations can be
seen at: http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/~jbattat/pitf/engin125/


Bios:

James Battat is a graduate student in Astronomy at Harvard. He appreciates
it when visualization technology is integrated into the classroom. When he's
not programming in ActionScript, he can be found testing relativity by
shining laser beams off of reflectors on the moon's surface and measuring
the Earth-Moon separation to 1 millimeter precision.

Aaron Gibralter is graduating from Harvard College in June 2007. Having
studied physics in his undergraduate career, including the mechanical
systems simulated in these Flash animations, he understands the usefulness
of interactive, visual representations of physical systems.

Aaron hopes that these animations will help engage students in often
abstractly and mathematically represented systems (as he most often
encountered in his physics classes), and in turn help them to better
understand the physical behavior. In addition to ActionScript coding, Aaron
enjoys building database-driven, MVC-oriented websites in frameworks such as
Ruby on Rails.

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Simulations