Effect of Poinsot Construction in Online Stereo 3D Rigid Body Simulation on the Performance of Students in Mathematics and Physics
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Keywords:
Poinsot construction, Simulation of free rigid body motion, Mechanics in stereo 3D e-learningAbstract
The current paper aims at presenting the effects of free online stereoscopic 3D simulation developed by the author on the performance of students in mathematics and physics. The simulation visualizes the Poinsot construction in free rigid body motion. The student is assisted in understanding the famous construction and in better comprehending the Newtonian mechanics and mastering its underlying mathematical model. The Poinsot construction is rendered in stereo 3D graphics in the web browser and the simulation shows the construction’s inherent elements, such as invariant ellipsoids, invariant plane, polhode, herpolhode, etc. The latter are watched along with a large number of involved parameters: vectors and scalars. The presented material is directed towards university students taking the Analytical (Mathematical) Mechanics courses in the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics and students taking the Theoretical Physics and General Physics courses in the Faculty of Physics in Sofia University, Bulgaria, but is not limited to use in other universities due to simulation’s free unrestricted access on the Internet. The software was tested and its effectiveness was ascertained through experimental and control groups. Data collected in such experiments is presented in order to support the relevance of the study. Stereoscopic 3D simulations are a fruitful method for observation of phenomena hard to realize in laboratory conditions such as weightlessness. The simulation, discussed in this paper can be viewed and used from http://ialms.net/sim/ web address.
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