Physlets, educational applets developed at Davidson College, are a widely used teaching resource designed to simulate a variety of physical phenomena. Originally, each Physlet was a Java simulation that was embedded in an HTML page as an applet and then customized using JavaScript to simulate a specific physics concept. The use of Java to simulate…

Today's students are increasingly immersed in a landscape of screens and handheld digital devices through which a good deal of their interactions with the world around them are mediated. Physics educators, meanwhile, continue to rely on traditional human interactions with the physical world, such as sliding down a ramp or throwing a baseball, in…

In almost any given day, one will stumble upon sounds that are out of the ordinary, distinct enough to capture one's attention. Ordinary sounds in a home are represented by the white-noise-like background created by speaking, moving around, household appliances running, and so forth. The out of the ordinary is the sparkling sound of a knife blade…

The frequency ratios for the just diatonic scale are obtained by identifying musical intervals corresponding to Lissajous figures. The demonstration integrates the engineering physics of Lissajous patterns with the recognition of musical intervals through simple ear training. A free HTML5 app has been developed for this class activity and the…

Smartphones and tablets are packed with sensors that allow us to take experimental data, essentially making them mobile physics labs. Apps exist that make it easy to capture and analyze data from these sensors, allowing users to study diverse phenomena such as free fall acceleration, the speed of sound,radioactivity, and many others. Commonly, the…

Color addition and subtraction apps in HTML5 have been developed for students as an online hands-on experience so that they can more easily master principles introduced through traditional classroom demonstrations. The evolution of the additive RGB color model is traced through the early IBM color adapters so that students can proceed step by step…

The result of additive colors is always fascinating to young students. When we teach this topic to 14- to 16-year-old students, they do not usually notice we use maximum light quantities of red (R), green (G), and blue (B) to obtain yellow, magenta, and cyan colors in order to build the well-known additive color diagram of Fig. 1. But how about…

With the increased availability of modern technology and handheld probeware for classrooms, the iPad and the Video Physics application developed by Vernier are used to capture and analyze the motion of an ice hockey puck within secondary-level physics education. Students collect, analyze, and generate digital modes of representation of physics…

Describes computer program (available on diskette for Apple IIe/II-plus, Commodore PET/CBM, or Commodore 64) providing drill/practice on concepts of electric charge, electric current, and electric potential difference. A second diskette provides a test of fifteen multiple-choice questions, with option to print score and areas of weakness. (JM)