Learn more about kinetic, potential and thermal energy by placing a skater on several preset or user-defined tracks and adding friction.
- Energy Skate Park: Basics
- Version :2.13
- License :Freeware
- OS :Windows All
- Publisher :University of Colorado
Energy Skate Park: Basics Description
Energy Skate Park: Basics is a lightweight Windows application designed specifically for helping you learn about the conversation of energy. The tool can be used for educational purposes as it comes with an interactive learning method and smart approach in order to get information about kinetic, potential and thermal energy.
The advantages of being portable
Energy Skate Park: Basics comes in a portable package which can be deployed on your system without having to go through installation steps. Plus, it doesn’t leave any traces in your Windows registry.
You may copy it on any USB flash drive or other devices and take it with you whenever you need to learn or teach about the conservation of energy.
This is a Java-based program so you need to previously deploy the working environment on your computer in order to run the utility.
User-friendly layout
You are welcomed by a clean and intuitive working environment where you can make use of a fictional skater in order to explore different tracks and view the kinetic energy, potential energy and friction as he moves.
The program adopts a multi-tabbed layout where you can explore the Introduction, Friction and Track Playground sections.
Analyzing energy parameters
Energy Skate Park: Basics gives you the possibility to work with three different tracks and place the skater on the desired position on the track using the drag-and-drop support.
What’s more, you can opt for a slow motion or normal display mode, start, pause or stop the process, reveal a bar graph with info about the kinetic, potential, thermal and total energy values, display a pie chart which follows the skater and updates the information in real-time, show or hide the grid, as well as measure the speed with the aid of a special device.
Additionally, you can make the application return the skater if he leaves the field of view and reset all parameters with just one click.
Friction parameters and custom playground
You can enable or disable the friction in your experiments, make the skater stick to the track, as well as adjust the friction using a built-in slider. Last but not least, you are given the freedom to create your own tracks using drag-and-drop actions and control points.
Bottom line and performance
All in all, Energy Skate Park: Basics delivers an interactive environment and several handy features for helping you analyze and study the conservation of energy, and is suitable for all types of users, regardless of their experience level. The tool reveals the energy information very quickly but it eats up CPU and memory, so the overall performance of the computer may be affected.