Adobe Boston Users Group website is at:
http://www.abug.us
The Boston Flash Platform User Group's website is at:
http://www.bfpug.com
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Topic: Flash Physics Simulations
Presenter: James Battat
Aaron Gibralter
Date: Thursday, April 19, 2007
Time: 7:00 - 9:00 PM
Cost: Free
Where: MIT Stata Building
AKA Building 32, on this map:
http://whereis.mit.edu/map-jpg
Room 32-141
Description:
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.