Elder High School

Project Name: PhysBuzz

Project Category: Innovative Programming

Project Description: The purpose of PhysBuzz is to create a software based 2d physics simulation lab to teach kids and adults alike physics principles. PhysBuzz is going to include a highly-configurable simulation builder which will allow to turn on and off different principles of physics to focus on certain principles at a time. It will contain a large array of objects and pre-made simulations to use in your creations or to learn from. The main feature point of the program is the Simulation builder which will allow for people to create custom 2d physics simulations. The User Interface will have highly interactive menus that will allow dragging and dropping shapes from our pre-made library of assets and physics objects, as well as the opportunity to make your own in a shape builder. The Lab builder will allow for a key-frame oriented simulation building that will allow for events, like a force to push an object, to happen at a certain time, or over a length of time. The Lab builder, as mentioned earlier, will allow for turning off different physics principles when designing a simulation, like turning off the Drag equations, or turning off friction. The simulation engine itself: When running a project in the Lab builder or as a lesson, the physics simulation will be allowed to be stopped whenever, or even re-winded to see the state of physics objects at that time. by clicking on a certain object, greater detail of the forces acting on the object and how it is effecting them will be show, like in the case of a bouncing ball, you will be able to stop a simulation of a ball bouncing up and click on it, and the program will draw a free-body diagram on screen and show the movement vectors of the ball, and other forces that are enabled in the simulation, like a vector of Drag or Gravity, or if a ball is rolling down a ramp, you will be able to see the equation for how to get the speed of the ball on the ramp, see the velocity vector of the ball, and if enabled, the friction vector acting back on the ball from the ramp it is on. As a teacher you will have a special ability to sign up for a custom classroom connection link to be made so you can give it to your students who will be able to join it on their computers so the teacher can send Labs Packs, Lesson Packs, and Homework packs to students. As a student, you can create your own labs, share them with the internet or other students on your class code, or even collaborate with other students for labs. The class code given by a teacher will link your computer to a custom server just for your class to allow getting content sent straight to your program by the servers from the teacher. As an individual you will have access to uploading and downloading user creations from and to the internet. There will also be the option to download curated Lesson Packs from us, the developers, or other approved lesson packs made by users or teachers who wanted to submit the packs to the rest of the world. This program is designed to help individuals, teachers, and students learn the concepts of physics in a more fun and interactive way, offering teachers to create and share lessons and assignments for students to interact with and learn from and Individuals a place to learn physics without just a bunch of text and equations on the screen like other teaching resources out there. The program will be able to connect to servers and you will be able to download and share yours and others' creations. Another feature of having an online connection is to allow custom classroom servers to allow teachers to send students Labs, lessons, and homework activities. The project is meant to lower the cost of entry to the field of physics and to make learning it fun and interactive to help more people learn more in a smaller amount of time and enjoy doing so.

Funding, Resources, and Technology Comments: This project is flexible, in the sense that those who use it can create other forms of output such as lights, sounds, etc. in order to wake up the individual.No Funding Resources and technologies: Love2D, a free, very small framework that makes a wrapper around the widely known rendering engine OpenGL, which makes use of the coding language Lua, it is mostly known as a game engine, but because of its extreme lack of constraints on what you can do, like being strictly code based, its moreso just a framework and you can do lots of things with the engine. The program is largely cross-platform, and can be ported to most mainstream devices with relative ease and lack of change to the code. It comes with several built-in libraries and code bases, and the big one that we will be using for this project is the physics library, which is actually a long-standing and well known 2d physics library called Box2D Other resource that may be made of is freesound.org and other free asset sites, but we will be using mostly our own. We may also be using other miscellaneous lua libraries to speed up the development process and as to not have to "recreate the wheel" per-se Most external(as in not integrated into the framework already i.e. love.physics) libraries will be made by us, and will only make use of other smaller libraries to make development more efficient