Minutes 9.26.15

Abstract:

In the realm of education, there are many great software suites for exploring concepts like mathematics and chemistry. However, students and instructors alike lack a tool for modeling and exploring the behaviors of physical systems. Existing software such as SmartPhysics is useful, but ultimately only teach the fixed systems that the authors have built in advance. Moreover, students have no ability to interact with these systems or see them in motion. What if both educators and students had a tool to construct their own system and watch how it changes through time?

Enter Principia. This web-based project is designed to helps students reinforce key concepts through visualizing physical scenarios. A user can build a system by dragging and dropping elements like ramps, pulleys, or springs into a frame in their browser. Then the simulation can be run to see the elements interact with each other over time, with the ability to pause the simulation at any point and query the state of an element. Users would be able to save their simulations and share them with others. Special privileges would be available for instructor accounts to manage a classroom, including the ability to incorporate quizzes or assignments into their system.

Principia would serve as a powerful supplement to any physics classroom or as a playground that would allow students to further explore concepts in a visually exciting way.

Decisions

• Project name: Principia (still need to decide on a url)
• Core target: Classrooms
• Anybody can use it online without an account. Once you log in, you get access to more classroom type features.
• Immediate Goal
  • Build a playground that any user can experience without having to log in
• Long Term Goals
  • Support classroom settings. Teachers can log in and share simulations with their classroom users.
  • Teachers can create simulations that can be shared with students as part of an assignment or quiz
  • Teachers can create quizzes or assignments
  • Users can log in and save and share simulations
  • Potentially embed a chat service into each page so students can chat with other students about that simulation