Simulate!

Simulate! is a program designed to combine hypertext, animation, and simulation to help teach problem solving skills in college-level physics, specifically electromagnetism. The embedded hypertext window provides a means by which one may construct rich text formatted hypertexts that may include graphical elements, audio, and video, as well as internal macros for controlling the animation and simulation aspects of the program.

Simulate! provides both design and playback of the animations and simulations. It does not, however, provide direct modification of the hypertexts. For that, a word processor and the Microsoft MediaView compiler are necessary.

Toolbar

At the top of the Simulate! window can be found a toolbar with quick buttons for common tasks, and a toolbox of components that may be dragged onto the simulation window to create animations and/or simulations. At any given time, either the quick buttons or the toolbox may be hidden via the View menu.

Due to the large number of components available in the toolbox, the components have been grouped by function and placed on separate pages of a tabbed notebook. By clicking on the tabs at the bottom of the toolbox, the user can bring the corresponding page of components into view.

Hypertext Window

In the hypertext window may appear formatted text, graphics, audio samples, and even embedded video. In addition, text and graphics may be links to other pages within the hypertext, or may trigger internal macros that control the behavior of the Simulate! program. (In the example shown below, the blue text indicates links to other locations in the hypertext.)

The Microsoft MediaView hypertext engine was encapsulated within a Delphi component in order to include it within this program. The MediaView system provides a compiler for creating hypertexts from rich formatted text, as well as the necessary libraries to control the engine.

The thin vertical bar along the right edge of the hypertext window is a handle that the user may to slide the window open or closed horizontally to hide or reveal the simulation window behind it.

Simulation Window

Within the simulation area, fully animated simulations of the interactions between charged particles and spheres may be modeled. In addition, text and graphics may added as well as components for measuring properties such as electric and magnetic fields within the planar space of the simulation.

To create a scenario, one simply drags components from the toolbox above and places them within the simulation area. Items can be dragged around the area as their effect on attributes such as electric field is immediately shown. Every component that may be placed within the simulation area has a collection of properties specific to its particular type, including horizontal and vertical position. These properties may be changed from within the properties window.

Properties Window

All components in the simulation window have a collection of corresponding properties. For instance, a charged particle component has an X and Y position, as well as an amount of charge. These values may be modified directly by selecting the component and editing the property value that appears

Properties may be of several different types: integers, real numbers, boolean values, strings, and lists. For the simple data types, values are simply typed directly into the field. However, the list and boolean types include a drop-down list of acceptable values from which one may be selected.

As one might expect, the properties window may be resized to reveal more or less of the property names and their values. Additionally, the window may be closed during animation playback or simply to remove it from view.

Animation Control

Simple, linear animations may be built within the simulation window on a frame by frame basis. The animation toolbar provides controls for stepping forwards and backwards through the animations, as well adding and deleting frames.

All of the actions that are available via the animation bar are also accessible from the Presentation menu. In fact, as with menu of the other interface elements, the animation bar may be hidden from the View menu.