Abstract:

The design of visual tools is a challenge for teachers in engineering careers. They have to choose the content and create a friendly interface. However, it is worth the effort as visual apps stimulate students’ interest and curiosity. These kind of tools are part of the students’ daily activities.

The research Group GIE (Grupo Ingeniería & Educación, in Spanish) has been developing for many years, a collection of tailor made apps related to different issues included in several courses at Facultad Regional San Nicolás, Universidad Tecnológica Nacional, Argentina. Classes based on the use of these applications become an ideal complement to the theoretical or problem solving classes.These tools can help students to interact and change parameters to obtain and analyze results.

The aim of this paper is to describe a set of apps developed to deal with some topics studied in a Physics’ first course, which are Graphical User Interfaces (GUI), programmed in SciLab. This is a high level programming language for scientific computation, interactive, free and available in multiple operative systems (Unix, GNU/Linux, Windows, Solaris, Alpha) developed by INRIA (Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et Automatique) and the ENPC (École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées).

The possibility of performing computer simulations does not replace experiences of real, laboratories, although they provide an easier and more accessible way to observe and analyze different phenomena.

This paper presents three tools. The first, an example of kinematics, shows movements under the action of gravity. The others, related to dynamics, are two masses in a pulley and a mass sliding along an inclined plane, attached to a pulley at the top with other mass hanging down the right vertical side.

Keywords:

Custom tools, SciLab, Physics.