A few weeks ago I made some changes to the radioactive decay learning object to allow the choice of three different half-lives & as my students would say…… my bad. I just realised that the half-life didn’t always change (it would get stuck on 10 minutes.
I’ve fixed this up now, so you should be able to see fairly obviously from watching the black / white graph or from the time graphs that there is a difference. X has a half-life of 41 seconds (log 2 minutes), Y is 5 minutes & Z is 10 minutes.
For those interested, I made a presentation to the STAV Physics teachers conference on the use of the virtual lab in the physics classroom. Here is a pdf of the presentation, with all of the links at the end.
Hi folks,
It’s a new year & a new look blog.
Happy new year!
So, I’ve really slowed down on the site this year. There are a number of reasons, but I’m just making excuses. I have, however, embarked on the project of making all of the source code available for users to do what they want & making windows or mac projectors of the learning objects available for off-line use.
It’s been a very slow year for me, so this is a bit of an apology & an explanation. So why so little new content this year? Well…. firstly there are always lots of things to do in life that are actually more important than spending many hours working on fiddly flash things. Second, it seems that most of the ideas that I’ve had for useful, original learning objects I’ve now completed or in the time that I’ve been working on this project someone else has done (& usually better than me too). So with some holiday time coming soon, I’ll try to finish off a couple of unfinished projects & evaluate anything that needs improvement for next year.
I’m presenting at the Science Teachers Conference on the teaching of electricity. Here are the documents if anyone is interested:
Teaching electricity presentation
Using multimeters
Year 8 prac notes , answers
Year 10 prac notes , answers
Electrical engineering workbook
DC motor animation.
Now that Unit 4 Physics is underway, we’ve been looking at DC motors. I have constructed an animation that shows the relationship between current, magnetic field & rotation. It’s currently a bit primitive, but a few options will be added in future.
The reaction time learning objects allows a user to test their reaction times for visual or audio cues. I am also working on implementing a random generator that changes the size and shape of the cat, as well as randomly changing from the sight test to the sound test. Nothing revolutionary here, but a nice simple (& fun) test.
I have made some major changes to the rectifier smoothing learning object. The previous full-wave rectifier animation has been incorporated into it & output graphs for full wave rectification are now possible. Also, the method used to calculate DC voltages for un smoothed output has been changed to the averaging process as used in smoothing, rather than the approximation equation. A lot of behind the scenes work, but very worthwhile.
Today I am presenting at the STAV Physics Teachers Conference, on the topic of the Virtual Lab. Here is a pdf copy of the keynote presentation.