Review for:3D Magnetostatic Field Simulation

posted: on January 11, 2007 at 2:58PM

Physics

Magnetism

My students had questions about the magnetic field and how things behaved in a magnetic field. I found this resource while trying to find answers. It worked well to give students an idea of what dynamically happens to things in different magnetic fields.

Honors or Advanced

We sat in class and I posed questions, showed them the applet, moving from the field vectors to the field lines, then showing the motion of charged or magnetic particles in the given field. We zoomed in and out and rotated the 3D cube. They got dizzy (grin). Prior to the class I had decided the order I wanted to show things; we went from action in a uniform field to what happened around a current loop to what happened around a solenoid...

Provides visualization or animation, Increases modeling skills, Provides a virtual lab, Provides additional content

I thought this was a fabulous applet; it really showed what happened to particles in a field. You could turn the box, zoom in and out, show many different field-causing wires, and (best of all) see what happened to tiny magnets placed in the field. I guided my students through it, making them predict what it would show before showing it, which I think is a good way to work with applets like this. By the end, students with more advanced questions had them answered and students with fewer questions had answers to things they had not yet even considered.

This made some of my students dizzy. It would have been nice if each person could play with it on his or her own. (Which we could have done if I had gotten out the laptops). It was confusing, and possibly some students did not understand some of what was shown.