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phetsims / forces-and-motion-basics

"Forces and Motion: Basics" is an educational simulation in HTML5, by PhET Interactive Simulations.
http://phet.colorado.edu/en/simulation/forces-and-motion-basics
GNU General Public License v3.0
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User suggestion: add hundredths digit to acceleration value #217

Closed oliver-phet closed 7 years ago

oliver-phet commented 7 years ago

A suggestion--For the simulation "Forces and Motion: Basics" with acceleration tab, give values with more digits--at least 2 significant digits. When my students ran the program to see relationship between mass, force and acceleration they get the same values when not the same input values are used. For example, when keeping force at 50 N (no friction) they get 0.3 m/s2 when they use masses of 150 kg and 200 kg. I hope you can fix this before next semester. Also, we used the chrome version. Thanks.

ariel-phet commented 7 years ago

@arouinfar this seems like a reasonable change. I suppose my only question is do we display hundredths only in the case where we have something like 0.XX m/s^2 (so there are 2 sig figs always) and go to just tenths when it is some number like XX.X m/s^2, or do we always display the second decimal point?

@jessegreenberg I assume displaying the hundredths place would overall be a trivial change?

arouinfar commented 7 years ago

Seems reasonable to me too @ariel-phet. In general, I'd prefer to keep a consistent number of decimal places rather than a consistent number of digits. I'll take a look at FAMB to see which option is more appropriate in this context.

arouinfar commented 7 years ago

@ariel-phet I took a look at FAMB, and I'm still leaning towards always displaying the hundredths place. I think it would feel strange to lose a decimal place at high (>10 m/s^2) values of acceleration.

ariel-phet commented 7 years ago

Sounds good to me @arouinfar.

@jessegreenberg perhaps make this change in a way we can test? Either on phettest or such?

jessegreenberg commented 7 years ago

@ariel-phet @arouinfar can you review this version?

http://www.colorado.edu/physics/phet/dev/html/forces-and-motion-basics/2.1.1-rc.2/forces-and-motion-basics_en.html

This includes changes for #213.

arouinfar commented 7 years ago

Looks good to me! Thanks @jessegreenberg.

ariel-phet commented 7 years ago

Looks good to me as well!

jessegreenberg commented 7 years ago

Great, thanks. We will bring in a change for #218 before redeploying.

jessegreenberg commented 7 years ago

This maintenance release should include changes for

http://www.colorado.edu/physics/phet/dev/html/forces-and-motion-basics/2.1.1-rc.3/forces-and-motion-basics_en.html

Just goint to sanity check for a few minutes before redeploying.

jessegreenberg commented 7 years ago

@arouinfar @ariel-phet @oliver-phet version 2.1.1 has been deployed with changes for #218, #217 and #213.

Assigning back to @oliver-phet in case the user should be notified.

oliver-phet commented 7 years ago

User emailed. Closing.