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phetsims / pendulum-lab

"Pendulum Lab" is an educational simulation in HTML5, by PhET Interactive Simulations.
GNU General Public License v3.0
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Question about "step function" size #182

Closed kathy-phet closed 6 years ago

kathy-phet commented 6 years ago

I was wondering whether there had been design discussion around the step function size in Pendulum lab? I was playing with it just now, and it seemed to be pretty course to me - making big steps. And the step size was the same on both the slow motion and the fast motion scales. The result was that you really could not get fine step control for showing very explicit observations ... like that at the peak of the motion is when velocity is zero, or that acceleration points up the string at the base of the swing. You can use slow-mo to show those things, but it is hard to show it passing through it with step.

@jonathanolson - How is the step function done in the code? Is it something that is relatively easy to tweak, or is it hard to tweak?

jonathanolson commented 6 years ago

How is the step function done in the code? Is it something that is relatively easy to tweak, or is it hard to tweak?

Very easy to tweak, and any values should work. Let me know if it should be different when in slow motion.

Currently it is stepping by 50ms (0.05s) of "true time" in all cases, even slow motion.

kathy-phet commented 6 years ago

Hi JO, Thanks. Can we try 10 ms of "true time" in all cases and see what that looks like?

jonathanolson commented 6 years ago

Changed, can you see how that feels?

kathy-phet commented 6 years ago

Feels great! Thanks. Also checked with Mike D and he says for his teaching this is good change.

kathy-phet commented 6 years ago

Closing.

phet-steele commented 6 years ago

Let's get @arouinfar's opinion on this before closing, although I'm sure this change is relatively harmless.

kathy-phet commented 6 years ago

Yep - Amy, what do you think?

arouinfar commented 6 years ago

@kathy-phet this was a great suggestion! I tested the new step size on master and everything looks good @jonathanolson. Closing.