![]() ![]() If they’re taking requests, I’d love some simple annotation tools, so that one could easily place arrows and text on the screen without having to tie them to an object. The developers seem to be making rapid improvements to the software, so I wouldn’t be surprised if in the near future you’ll find it possible to plot multiple object in the same graph. It also gives me one more very useful tool for exploring computational thinking, and more to think about in how to help students learn to determine the best tool for solving a particular physics problem (Aglodoo, VPython, Mathematica, etc). I can also imagine that it would be very powerful for all of my students to have this when we go 1-1 next year. OverallĪs someone who once truly loved Interactive Physics, I really enjoy playing with Algodoo Physics-it’s an incredible refined physics simulation engine compared to what I worked with previously. ![]() In addition, the education version comes with settings to make it easier to use on interactive whiteboards as well. View this document on Scribd Other featuresĪlgodoo has built-in support for graphics tablets, and I found it to be incredibly easy to use with my Wacom tablet. The attachment below does contain a number of the better lessons you’ll find. Unfortunately, the lessons I checked out were somewhat lacking-most are fairly basic descriptions of steps to follow to explore why wheels are round, etc, and don’t include links to simulation files to get you started. The education version also allows you access to the lesson browser, which contains a large set of lessons created by users around the world describing how to use Algodoo to teach various physics topics. Some of these simulations are so amazing that I find myself wondering how they were created by the users-they are an order of magnitude more complex than anything I could imagine creating myself. Currently, the library is somewhat limited, and focused mostly on intricate (and pretty cool) simulations of working machine guns. Networked featuresĪlgodoo promises to allow you access to a library of ready made simulations for use in your classroom. Overall, these features show great promise, and I hope that the developers will add to it, perhaps making it easier do ray diagrams by making it possible to add reference lines and objects that one could then use to locate real and virtual images. But it is pretty awesome for simulating basic light refraction and reflection in various media. The optics elements are pretty basic, and while you can use the various editing tools to modify them, I don’t think they’re quite customizable enough to serve as some sort of virtual optics lab-it’s pretty hard to create a lens of a given focal length, for instance. ![]() It took less than 5 minutes to create this. Controls are pretty intuitive-you can quickly use the tool palette to begin to draw objects, and double clicking on any object will bring up a control panel with a host of options. When you start Algodoo, you’re presented with a wide open canvas to begin to draw objects. This is pretty much an indispensable feature in my book, so I encourage you to spring for the more expensive version. For teachers, the primary advantage of the more expensive education version is the ability to create graphs and view vectors in your simulations. Getting startedĪlgodoo comes in two versions, education and regular. It was great, but unfortunately, it seems like it’s development died back in mid 2005, especially for the mac, where it no longer runs at all.Įnter Algodoo physics-it’s got everything you love and remember from Interactive Physics, and so much more, wrapped up in a beautiful interface. Perhaps you remember Interactive Physics-it was a great piece of physics simulation software that allowed you to simply draw objects on a screen-springs, spheres, ramps, pulleys, and then set the parameters for the world, like the strength of the drag force or gravitational field, and then run the simulation to observe the behavior of the system, visualizing the not just the motion of the object, but also individual force and velocity vectors. ![]()
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