My experience of using Java animation in the teaching of undergraduate physics courses

We adopted Serway as the physics textbook for the first year physics undergraduate in the School of Physics, USM. The textbook comes with a load of Java simulation in the form of attached CD given for free to the instructor by the publisher. In these CD the physics instructor can find for every chapter computer simulations to demonstrate the evolution of physical systems under some specific physical laws such as conservation of momentum, energy, and Newton’s second law. Traditionally, these laws are taught and explained using figures and oral explanation by instructors, while the formulas are rote-momorised by students. The symbolic mathematical equations, which encode a profound amount of constraint on how a physical system should behave in space and time, make no sense to many students as they can’t make connection between these equations and the real world. Now thanks to the Java simulation, the students can visualise vividly how the energy make-up of a simple harmonic pendulum changes with time as the pendulum oscillate. The students can also see with their eyes what happen to the energy make-up as a function of space and time when the pendulum is displaced with different initial amplitude. When I was a student in the 1990’s an era when PC was still not a commonplace, the only way I visualise the simple harmonic pendulum is by making blind guess in my mind and were sometimes lead to wrong pictures of the real situations. Now the Java simulation has become so well developed and easily available. It is a very wasteful act of a physics teacher to not make use of these Java simulations for undergraduate level physics teaching. Adopting simulation in my lectures for the 101 Mechanics and the 104 Modern Physics is my policy. Computer simulation is one of the most effective tools to convey the physical relevance to our word as depicted by the abstract mathematical symbols. A physics teacher who is really enthusiastic about making physics comprehensible to his/her students should be one who shows Java simulations in his/her class.