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Re: [Phys-l] simulations

I found the wanton destruction of bunnies to be very distracting.

Bob at PC

-----Original Message-----
From: phys-l-bounces@carnot.physics.buffalo.edu [mailto:phys-l-bounces@carnot.physics.buffalo.edu] On Behalf Of John Clement
Sent: Monday, July 26, 2010 2:05 PM
To: 'Forum for Physics Educators'
Subject: Re: [Phys-l] simulations


I've done some simulation work in the past and these look pretty good.
What does it mean when the gaming world has better simulations than the
physics research world?

It depends on what you mean by better.

While game simulations are much fancier, all of that fanciness distracts
from any attempts to learn physics. Eric Mazur has been doing some
interesting studies about illustrations in physics texts. Drawings or
pictures that have people tend to distract the student from the relevant
physics details. Also attempts to make drawings look realistic may produce
misconceptions. The Private Universe video showed that misconceptions about
planetary orbits may come from "perspective" drawings, and extraneous
sidebar details.

The PHET videos are actually excellent quality, but designed to reveal
physics details, and have been tested using students. The roll your own
Physlets have proven to be useful, but they can be used to reveal physics
details without many distractions. Indeed the lack of ability to do very
fancy things may make physlets much more useful by preventing the author
from putting in distracting details.

I suggest looking at graphs in most texts. They are often very fancy, but
they are often vary misleading. In particular graphs showing the
temperature rise vs th heating of water are more often wrong than right.
They often get the slopes wrong, or the horizontal scale is distorted. By
breaking the graph, the student is mislead about the relative internal
energy storage by various mechanisms.

Most game programs are concerned with making things "look" realistic, but
not with making them "actually" realistic. I suspect there are distortions
which are designed to fit in with the player's misconceptions.

Better physics simulations would not only be accurate, but would be
researched to see how well they help students learn. We do not have the
sort of money to put into the education research that game manufacturers put
into marketability research, so our simulations are probably not as good.

John M. Clement
Houston, TX

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