VirtualLab

Inspiration

Stories of some of the lackluster simulation programs that teachers at my high school have been using to teach virtual science classes, as well as feeling like standard simulations never give me enough freedom to play around with the equipment

What it does

In this game, the player can move the various objects around to set up a physics lab experiment. There are gates for measuring velocity and time, and all the objects have adjustable properties. There's even a tool to measure distance. Right now there aren't too many objects to play with, but it's easy to add more and design scenes for different lab setups.

Many standard simulations let you play around with parameters, but you don't have too much freedom. In my project, you basically build the lab setup yourself. Right now, there's only a single demonstration scene with a cannon setup. Unfortunately, the only way to add new scenes is to clone the project, edit it in Unity, and rebuild, but the goal of this submission is to show what the final product should look like. With more time, I would have implemented an in-game scene editor.

You could give students a choice of equipment to use in the scene, or pre-build the setup for them. Either way, students have to place the measurement devices and record the data themselves within the virtual space. Unity's calculations happen in something similar to SI units, which makes this an ideal setting.

How I built it

The entire thing is a Unity project, with each "lab" being a scene (there's only one scene right now, but it contains all of the features I built)

Challenges I ran into

I haven't touched Unity in over half a year, so I had to look up how to do a lot of things all over again. I also ran into some issues with the WebGL build (I wasn't expecting to build to WebGL, so some things didn't carry over quite as they should have)

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Relearning enough Unity to make this.

What I learned

I learned a few interesting things about Unity's physics calculations. Also, building Unity projects in WebGL and using Github for Unity projects were new to me.

What's next for VirtualLab

Adding more equipment (like pendulums, etc.) to play with, adding more pre-made lab scenes. An in-game scene editor would be nice as well, but that'll take a lot more time.

Built With

• unity