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Office: 245 PG
Phone: (530) 752-6234
FAX: (530) 752-4717
Contact me at: rwcole@ucdavis.edu
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The ElectroCard project began as an outgrowth of an Associated Western Universities, Inc. project under the direction of Edmund K. Miller at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory during the summers of 1984-86 to created computer animations of electromagnetic phenomena.
ElectroCard is an interactive exploration of the topics of Electricity and Magnetism and concentrates on dynamic processes and understanting the fundmental relationship between fields and charged particles. ElectroCard 1.0 was initially funded by an Information Technology award at UC Davis and consists of several HyperCard stacks that run on the MacIntosh platform from Apple Computer, Inc.
ElectroCard 2.0 was funded by the NSF/IEEE Center for Computer Applications in Electromagnetic Education (CAEME). More HyperCard stacks and many enhancements were added. ElectroCard 2.0 is available from CAEME.
ElectroCard 3.0 is a Web-based interactive project that utlilizes Java applets, animated QuickTime movies and simulations. It is still in the experimental stage and is a long time from being completed. Be sure to have JavaScript and Java enabled on your web browser before accesssing ElectroCard 3.0. It has been partially funded by the COnceptual Learning Of Science project (COLOS) from Hewlett-Packard and an IUC grant from UC Davis.
SilverHammer (download 124 kB) is a program written at the UC Davis Physics Department by undergraduate physics majors under the supervision of Rod Cole. It is only in the alpha stage. You can use it to plot the fields created by point charged particles. The particles can be moving or accelerating and the radiated fields can be map. It supports a primative draw-program interface. It only runs under the MacOS (OS 7.0 or above) and is a bin-hexed and Stuffit compressed set of files. Further development has been stopped to develop Java-based replacements.
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I have written 2 books to help prepare students to take University Physics. The first is for the calculus-based engineerging physics series and the second is for the trigonometry-based physics series typically taken by the bioscience majors at UC Davis.
The books are available from Thompson Learning.
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My publications delve into two areas: increasing the diversity of the physical science community at the university and using computer simulations to teach electricity and magnetism to university physical science and engineering majors. Electricity and Magnetism is a particularly abstract branch of physics that is described by four coupled partial differential equations known as Maxwell's equations. It typically takes years of study to develop an intuitive feeling for this discipline. By using computer simulations we are trying to shorten and enrich this process for students of E & M.
Some papers will be converted to pdf format as time allows.
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