Case Study:
Simulation

Introduction

Simulations can be used as a very effective tool in education. Physical simulations can provide much of the capability of a laboratory, at a much lower cost and with more flexibility. There are numerous applications that have been created over the years for teaching physics (e.g., Interactive Physics II), but they are generally limited to whatever features were provided by the software developer.

OpenDoc and SOM allow the design of an extensible simulation, so that new physical bodies and new lab instruments like gauges and meters can be designed by 3rd parties and added later by end users.

Developer

Jeremy Roschelle, Ph.D. has done a tremendous amount of work applying component technology to education. Jeremy is a Senior Software Designer on the SimCalc project. He provides a sample set of the OpenDoc parts described below in the Third-Party parts section of the OpenDoc DR5 release.

Components Used

Any container can be used, such as the ODFContainer document shown in the screen shot below.

Parts embedded inside include:

• EduSim part, which manages a simulation of two EduParticles moving in a gravitational field.
• EMMeter part, which can display physical parameters of an EduParticle. You must drag the particle of interest to the meter to connect the two.
• DataSampler part, which can display the velocity or acceleration of an EduParticle. These parts will also let you use the mouse to control the velocity or acceleration vector.

Technologies Used: Embedding, SOM Libraries, Extensions.

The EduObject parts can be embedded inside any container. The parts implement a special OpenDoc extension designed for inter-part communication. Much of the actual code to support building the parts for the simulation is contained in a SOM shared library called EduObject.

Programming Details

See Jeremy's Web-based description of the SOM interfaces for details on the EduObject libraries and extensions.