Physics Simulator

Inspiration

Our inspiration is our own experiences with physics. As both of us took physics for the first time this year, it was difficult to imagine abstract concepts and this program is designed to help fellow students visualize one important concept featured in the new course AP Physics 1.

What it does

The program takes user input for incline length, incline angle, and length the block travels over flat ground. It will eventually be able to simulate friction and has the options, but due to time constraints we were unable to finish the friction simulator.

How I built it

We coded it in Eclipse.

Challenges I ran into

We were initially struggling to simulate real gravity, as well as make sure there was some code for all of the numerous options. We had to write different code for Partial Incline, Full Incline, and No Incline, as well as input different user lengths. A high percentage of the code used concepts we had never really tried before and we had to figure it out with help from Mr. Maunu. We both had never worked together before, so we had to figure out how to work well together. We worked on one computer for the most part and debugged problems together, because we felt if we used two computers we didn't work well together.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

The fact that we actually managed to simulate gravity and an actual block was a big thing for us, saw ell as the fax that the block actually followed the incline.

What I learned

We learned how to tilt the block so it followed the land, but make sure that tilting the block didn't negate the code written before or send the block on a wildly tilting path all around the screen and off it.

What's next for Physics Simulator

We want to try to simulate friction as well so that our Simulator is a true representation of how an inclined plane work and it better fulfills it's task of turning abstract concepts in a textbook into a reality. We struggled to simulate it, but we ran out of time, so we need to debug our code.

Built With

• eclipse