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Session G02 - Computers in Education.
session, Tuesday afternoon, June 6, 14:00.
Monongahela Room, Westin William Penn Hotel
The mathematical preparation of students has often been the determining factor in the ordering of the undergraduate physics curriculum. Computational methods offer the possibility of freeing physics teaching from this artificial constraint. For example, the theoretical description of the radiation field from a moving charge is so mathematically complex that it is often omitted from the undergraduate physics curricullum, but the generation of a radiation field can be done computationally using an algorithm that employs only simple algebra and plane geometry, together with elementary concepts from electrostatics and special relativity.
A computer simulation of electromagnetic fields near a point charge moving in a plane has been written as part of CUPS (Consortium for Upper-level Physics Software). The simulation allows the radiation field to be presented early in the theoretical physics curriculum as a natural consequence of Coulomb's Law and Lorenz contraction. The simulation offers several options for investigating electric field, magnetic field, retarded potentials and the Poynting field for a variety of two-dimensional trajectories of a point charge. The simulation runs under MS-DOS and uses VGA color.