Educational Concepts: Science topics covered include projectile trajectories, forces, angles and velocities.
Technical & Design Challenges: To model the physics of an arrow in flight, including the effect of wind speed and direction. To create an online high score board so students from around the world can compete.
Educational Concepts: Science topics covered include the Doppler effect, sound waves and experimental perspective.
Technical & Design Challenges: To create multiple views of the same event. Saved time and development costs by modeling the activity separately from the graphical presentation. This allowed us to reuse the same model in both the plane and elevation views of the activity.
Educational Concepts: A recreation of Christian Doppler's original experiment to prove the "Doppler Effect." Physics topics covered include the Doppler effect, experimental perspective, audio pitch and sound waves.
Technical & Design Challenges: To simulate audio digital signal processing in Flash. To create a two-panel animation synchronized to multiple potential audio tracks.
Educational Concepts: Science topics covered include static friction, kinetic friction, coefficient of friction and forces.
Technical & Design Challenges: The client provided an initial version of this applet in Java, and asked us to add features to enhance the activity. Here we worked within the constraints of an initial design to create an enhanced final applet.
Educational Concepts: Science topics covered include gravity, air resistance, mass and experimental vacuum conditions.
Technical & Design Challenges: To recreate one of Galileo's famous experiments on the Tower of Pisa, and to then show how the same experiment would work if conducted in a vacuum. To simulate the effects of gravity on various objects in the experimental space, and to give students direct control over the objects in the experiment.
Educational Concepts: Science topics covered include geo-synchronous earth orbit and relative orbit periods.
Technical & Design Challenges: To animate the motion of a satellite in geo-synchronous earth orbit. To show the relationship of the satellite to other known orbiting objects including the international space station and the moon. To simulate 3D-animated objects in Flash.
Educational Concepts: This activity was created in response to a SEED user question, proving that when one drops a box out of a moving airplane, the box moves forward (not backward as it appears from the plane). Science topics covered include gravity, drag and experimental perspective.
Technical & Design Challenges: To create a synchronized animation to illustrate the flight of the plane and path of the dropping box from two simultaneous perspectives.
Educational Concepts: Science topics include tectonic plates; and divergent, convergent and transform plate movements, such as in the formation of mountains, earthquakes, and undersea volcanic activity.
Technical & Design Challenges: To teach students about tectonic plate movement by animating the three main types of tectonic plate movements and their effects on the geology at plate boundaries. To illustrate these complex geological phenomena via animation.
Educational Concepts: Science topics include tectonic plates, earthquakes and geography.
Technical & Design Challenges: To create an engine to read an XML file of seismic events parsed from the US Geological Survey web database, and render up to two thousand earthquakes on a simulated 3D-rendered globe. The student can rotate the globe 360 degrees and randomly access any point along the dynamically created timeline. This one application loads and renders any set of seismic data for any date range within processor limitations.
Educational Concepts: Science topics include viscosity and the effect of temperature on the viscosity of various common liquids.
Technical & Design Challenge: To create an engine that loads liquid viscosity data from an XML data file, and dynamically creates a simulation to test the viscosity of this liquid at a range of temperatures.