Inspiration
The large disconnect between students and educators I believe lies in a disconnect of what educators find "fun" vs what students find "fun". No student wants to use Quizlet to study the neutron. What they want is subway surfers in the background of lecture with an AI voiceover of the lesson. Jokes aside, in order to bridge the gap between education and gaming, I decided to create a Roblox game that models nuclear particle physics.
What it does
Spawn protons, neutrons and electrons to form atoms, view the effects of the strong nuclear force and Coulomb's Law.
How we built it
In Luau in Roblox's game-making engine "Roblox Studio"
Challenges we ran into
Constants having to be scaled up or down in order for the game to be playable. For example, if a nucleus was 1 cm thick, electrons would orbit a nucleus at around 0.5 km away from the nucleus. This leads to a horrible user experience so I had to mess with constants so that it still emulated real life while scaling the orbital distance down.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Making electrons orbit using nothing but the electric and strong nuclear force.
What we learned
Emulating real particle physics in a way that is viewable to the naked eye is no small feat. Some sacrifices had to be made of accuracy for playability. For example, adding a scaleFactor to the electric force for electrons so the electrons wouldn't experience very strong electric forces and fly off.
What's next for Nuclear Particle System
I believe I can expand this project into a larger project that allows for the creation of elements similar to what is seen here: https://phet.colorado.edu/sims/html/build-an-atom/latest/build-an-atom_all.html
Built With
- luau
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