Open Source Physics Educational Java Tools

Well, it’s good news bad news time.  I was excited to find these via an article in the Physics Teacher.  Clearly, I haven’t been paying attention, because they’ve been mentioned before, but the item which caught my attention was an article that used a program called Tracker to analyze 2D motion.  I immediately thought of using for projectile motion (what is the muzzle velocity of a Nerf® gun?).

I downloaded the tool, but couldn’t get it to load any of my videos. Mind you, the videos are crappy quality, but they should be QuickTime® compatible, and I can play then on my Linux (Fedora 10) laptop. But… some careful reading of the documention made it slowly apparent that they rely on QuickTime for Java, something which doesn’t exist for Linux (or any other *nix).  There is a demo package you can download, and it couldn’t load its own internal videos.  But it worked fine on a Windows XP host.  Presumably it will work just fine on MacOS X, too.

So, I can say that they look like they should be pretty fun to play around with if you have a compatible computer.  Tracker would have been way useful if I could use it on my laptop, but no joy there.  I should really complain about the lack of video support in Java in general, but that would just be whining.

If you are looking for Linux-compatible physics education "toys", I can recommend Physics3D.  Scroll down the page there to find the reference to "3D Multimedia Lab for Exploring Physics" where the toys are located.  Or, you can find Step in the KDE educational package, although it is a little harder since you have to setup the "experiment" yourself.