Visualization - a tool to understand electromagnetic fields and their effects

Electromagnetism is a notoriously difficult subject for beginning students. Visualization, especially animations, allows the student to gain insight into the way in which fields transmit forces, bywatching how the motions of material objects evolve in time in response to those forces. Such animations allow the student to make intuitive connections between forces transmitted by electromagnetic fields and forces transmitted by more prosaic means, e.g., by rubber bands and strings. TEAL has developed a number of simulations and visualizations along these lines, many of them suggested by the desktop experiments.

In addition to these passive visualizations, TEAL/Studio has developed Java applets that are interactive, and which illustrate many concepts in electromagnetism. This is feasible with modern laptop computers with their processing and graphics ability to, for example, calculate the motion of an electric charge in the field of a magnetic dipole, and also calculate field lines for the total magnetic field (due both to the moving charge and the dipole), using 4th order Runge-Kutta schemes. The applet then displays the field lines in a 3D rendering rapidly enough to make the motion of the charge and the field lines appear as a smooth realtime animation.