Peer Review

Physics Animations: Electricity and Magnetism

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Overview:: This site is a collection of three dimensional (3D) animations spanning many of the common topics generally covered in the electricity and magnetism section of undergraduate physics courses. It includes examples of summing fields from continuous charge and current distributions, views of common field and flux configurations from various perspectives, examples illustrating Gauss' law, some common physical examples illustrating electromagnetic forces on currents and charges, and some animations of various electromagnetic wave types.
Type of Material:: Animations
Recommended Uses:: Lecture demos and/or course supplements
Technical Requirements:: Windows Media Player or Apple's Quicktime Movie Viewer
Identify Major Learning Goals:: This collection is designed to help users gain a visual picture of many of the abstract ideas of electricity and magnetism. It helps the user gain a conceptual understanding of the topics from a variety of points of view.
Target Student Population:: Lower and Upper division undergraduates
Prerequisite Knowledge or Skills:: Students should be enrolled in the second semester of a standard calculusbased physics course, or a graduate or undergraduate electricity and magnetism course.

Rating:
Strengths:: The topics are well chosen. The animations accurately portray the physics in a way that is mostly self-explanatory. Their most important feature is that they provide a 3-D perspective of physical systems. The development of sophisticated mental images of physical systems is a major hurdle for student understanding.
Concerns:: Some of the topics covered are rather obscure, such as an elliptically polarized field, and some common items are omitted. There are no animations of either an electric generator or motor, though the torque on current loop animation is very close to the latter. This collection is continuing to grow, so any gaps will probably be filled in the future.

Rating:
Strengths:: The major strength of these animations for learning is that they provide a 3D perspective view of the systems. This is something difficult for most professors to achieve on a chalkboard or even to find in a textbook. A wide selection of topics are available.
Concerns:: There is no audio narration provided.
Instructors may prefer this for lectures because they want to make their own comments. However, students viewing these on their own may not understand the concepts being illustrated without additional explanation.

Rating:
Strengths:: Animations can be viewed in more than one format, depending on the link selected. They run fairly quickly. Files are available for direct download if instructors wish to do so.
Concerns:: Students may find the lack of explanation impedes understanding. A java applet to handle display would be appreciated by those operating in a non-Windows environment.

Other Issues and Comments:: These materials are licensed under Creative Commons and are available for other instructors to use for non-commercial purposes with attribution of the author.
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