Interactive Applets for Theoretical Mechanics

Physics education research has demonstrated that interactive applets can engage students in exploration that solidifies their understanding of physics concepts. Most available applets, however, target concepts in lower-division physics courses, and there are fewer interactive activities that help students learn abstract concepts such as the action-based formalism in theoretical mechanics. Motivated by this, we are developing interactive applets that enable students to explore concepts in theoretical mechanics and build intuition that connects to their existing knowledge of ideas from Newtonian mechanics. These applets are being developed with HTML, CSS, and Javascript, and they include manipulable animations, graphs, and illustrations, along with embedded tutorials, guided derivations, and gamified elements to strengthen student engagement. We are beta testing these applets at Harvey Mudd, with the ultimate goal of rolling them out more broadly and assessing their effectiveness in strengthening students’ conceptual understanding of theoretical mechanics.