Activities/Physics

Description

Physics is a physical world simulator and playground -- you can add squares, circles, triangles, or draw your own shapes, and see them come to life with forces (think gravity, Newton!), friction (scrrrrape), and inertia (ahh, slow down!).

Screenshots

A motor drives the centre cross shape, while the outer edges are pinned to stop the blender breaking.	One motor is used to drive a circle connected via a belt to another pinned wheel that bounces a weight to make a puppet dance.
More puppet dancing	Running dog using two motors
Using a motor on a circle to drive a piston that slowly releases balls one by one	Motor driven earthquake simulator
Example illustrating transverse wave propagation.	Example illustrating longitudinal wave propagation.

Ideas to try

• Build a machine that sorts different sized balls in to two buckets, large and small, with no ball jams.
• A cyclic mechanism for lifting balls from the bottom of the screen to the top, again and again.
• Try dropping 2 different mass objects at the same time.
• Experiment with pendulums of different lengths and masses.
• Ping pong, can you make a device that hits a ball back and forth across the screen?
• Try building a mechanical binary clock.
• Convert rotation into parallel motion using pistons.
• Experiment with touching one motorised circle against one pinned circle of various sizes.
• Try building a rag-doll puppet and make it dance in a convincing way.
• Use just links and circles to make a structurally sound Eiffel Tower.
• Try building a ratchet mechanism.
• Try building an analogue clock face where the min hand goes around 60 times for each hour.
• Modify the program itself: Modifying Physics

Tools

Activity Toolbar Button

Opens the activity toolbar (where you can share Physics for collaboration)

Tools Toolbar Button

Opens the tools toolbar (See below)

Play/Pause Button

allows you to stop time and start it again, allowing you to build constructions without them falling to the ground while you work. You can now use the Grab tool while time is stopped to easily re-arrange the position of objects. <Ctrl+space>

Erase Tool Button

click on an object to erase it, or click and hold to draw a line of destruction--erasing everything in its path! <Ctrl+E>

Erase-all Button

Erase all objects in current simulation

Draw Tool Button

click and hold to draw any shape you'd like! <Ctrl+D>

Circle Tool Button

circles of any radius. Click (center) drag and release (outer edge). <Ctrl+C>

Triangle Tool Button

triangles (equilateral) of any size and initial rotation. Click (center of base) drag and release. <Ctrl+T>

Box Tool Button

rectangles of any dimension. Click (corner) drag + release (opposite corner). <Ctrl+B>

Polygon Tool Button

as many sides as you would like. Draw your own N-gon. Click, drag and release for each point, to end return to the start point. <Ctrl+P>

Grab Tool Button

drag existing objects around with the mouse. <Ctrl+G>

Motor Tool Button

click an object to pin and drive it with clockwise rotation. It is easiest to stop the simulation, place your object, add its motor, and resume the simulation again. <Ctrl+M>

Pin Tool Button

pin a shape to the screen, it can rotate about the pin. If you want to lock a shape in place, use two or more pins to stop it rotating. <Ctrl+O>

Joint Tool Button

connect two objects together with a rod. Click on any object, drag to another object and release to create the joint (each end of joint allows rotation). <Ctrl+J>

Chain Tool Button

add a flexible chain to connect two objects together. Click and hold to draw any shape. If you start or stop on an object, it becomes connected to the end of the chain (like the joint tool)

Pen Tool Button

add a pen to any object to trace the motion of that object

All of the objects have palette menus to adjust object properties:

Mass

feather, wood, and anvil represent light to dense

Bounciness

bowling ball, baseball, and basketball represent inelastic to very bouncy

Friction

ice skate, shoe, and sneaker represent low to high coefficient of friction

The motor has a palette to set speed (fast and slow) and direction (clockwise and counterclockwise)

The chain has a palette to set the coarseness and weight of the chain elements

Hints and tips: Single clicking (no drag) with the circle, triangle or box tool, will add a default sized shape. Once you have used a shape tool, it remembers the last shape you made with it, a single click will add a clone of that last shape.

Development

There are quite a few code layers to contend with. A regular Python Activity acts as a Sugar wrapper to Physics which is written using OLPCGames which itself wraps Pygame, Physics then uses Elements as a wrapper for Box2D.

Video

Please do post videos with feedback, talking while you're trying something for the first time is particularly insightful as it can highlight those initial expectations for user interface behaviour. Bonus points to Dennis for being brave enough to be part of the first wave!

UI feedback Video unfortunately there's a seg fault at the end, ticket from Dennis is #1194.

Sugar at the Boston Museum, for more information see Bill Kerr's blog.

Release Notes

17

ENHANCEMENT:

• Chain tool behaves like magic pen: you can make loops and closed paths

16

ENHANCEMENT:

• Add sharing to magic pen and polygon
• Clean up of some internals

15

ENHANCEMENT:

• Added support for collaboration

BUG FIX:

• Fix problem with pause/play button

14

ENHANCEMENTS:

• New translations
• GTK3 conversion by Ignacio Rodriguez

13

ENHANCEMENTS:

• Added palettes to set density, bouciness, and friction (w/Sai Vineet)
• Added palette to set motor speed, rotation (w/Sai Vineet)
• Added chain tool (w/Sai Vineet)

BUG FIX:

• Updated Box2d version to eliminate some memory leaks (Sai Vineet)

12

ENHANCEMENTS:

• Added option to joints to set collideConnected = False
• Added clear_all (Sai Vineet)
• Added tracking (Sai Vineet)
• Added tracing (Sai Vineet)
• Added erase traces (Sai Vineet)
• Added save/restore of pens and traces (Sai Vineet)

BUG FIXES:

• Removed cjson dependency for elements
• pep8 cleanup (Sai Vineet)

11.9

• Removed cjson dependency for elements
• Added option to joints to set collideConnected = False
• Added clear_all (svineet)
• Added tracking (svineet)
• Added tracing (svineet)

v5

• Added support for new toolbar design for Sugar 0.86 (old toolbars still work for Sugar 0.84 and back)
• Objects can now be moved with the Grab tool while the simulation is paused!
• Tool code cleanup and refactoring
• Includes latest translations
• Many thanks go to Peter Froehlich, Akash Gangil, Craig Macomber, and the translation team.

v4

• Include latest translations
• License text updates (needed for Fedora/ SoaS Mirabelle)

v3

• Journal state saving now supported!
• MIME type support added so Physics Journal entries can be sent to others (application/x-physics-activity)
• Fixed Activity title text input so you can name your work correctly (olpcgames glitch)
• New Grab toolbar icon (hand)
• New Polygon toolbar icon (irregular polygon shape)
• Cleaned up toolbar order
• Single click behaviour so that Circle, Triangle, and Box tool add default sized shapes
• Single click behaviour for all tools, so that a subsequent single click creates a clone of the last shape made with that tool.
• Erase tool now erases (one by one) pins/joints/motors from a shape, before finally removing the shape itself.
• Using <Ctrl>+key for all keyboard shortcuts (was causing PyGame input focus issues when typing a title)
• Using the Sugar standard arrow cursor for the PyGame canvas (well, a fake one)
• Cleaned up the Activity icon
• Upgraded to new version of Elements 0.13
• Upgraded to new version of Box2D
• Picked up Pootle (July 3rd) translations

user notes

I really struggle to get any of the motor actions to work. Can you post some videos of your own successes? It's hard to build curriculum when you don't know how something is supposed to work.

v2

• Migrated to Sugar Labs
• Motor toolbar button added
• Pin toolbar button added
• Toolbar reworked for displaying state and keyboard accelerators
• Stop/play toolbar button added
• Prevented very small freehand and polygon shapes to prevent Box2d crashes

v1

• Original created by Brian Jordan, Alex Levenson, Chris Hager

Resources

• Activity bundle
• GIT repository
• Source tarball
• Bug tracker