The MIT TEAL Simulations and Visualizations in Electromagnetism

Science educators face a challenge of developing and implementing technology-rich learning materials and environments, especially in higher education. The Technology-Enabled Active Learning (TEAL) Project at MIT involves media-rich software for simulation and visualization in freshman physics. The objective of the project is to transform the way physics is taught in large enrollment physics classes at MIT in order to increase students' conceptual and analytical understanding and decrease failure rates in these courses. The approach is designed to help students develop better intuition about, and conceptual models of, electromagnetic phenomena. The reform is centered on an "active learning" approach -a collaborative, hands-on environment, with the use of desktop experiments, visualizations, web-based assignments, and a personal response system. The objective of the research is to assess cognitive outcomes of MIT undergraduate students who study electromagnetism in a large-scale TEAL setting and compare them with outcomes obtained in small-scale TEAL and traditional settings. We compared three groups: small-scale TEAL implementation, large-scale TEAL implementation, and traditional setting. Our study establishes that the TEAL-studio format has a significant and strong positive effect on the learning outcomes of MIT freshmen. The TEAL format enhanced the students' ability to transfer electromagnetic concepts from abstract to concrete.

strategies

The subject of electromagnetic fields is one of the most difficult subjects in the undergraduate curriculum of electrical engineering. Unlike mechanics, which deals with concrete objects, electromagnetics deals with intangible fields distributed in space, a concept that is abstract and difficult to gain insight. Students usually feel overwhelmed by the sophistication of the theory and, consequently, lose interest in learning. It is therefore not surprising that electromagnetic fields have motivated a variety of developments in education techniques designed to simplify it conceptually. In this paper, the strategy of computer visualization is explored for effective teaching. An assessment based on multiple-choice examination is done for evaluations of effectiveness of learning.

2013 1st International Conference of the Portuguese Society for Engineering Education (CISPEE), 2013

The electromagnetic theory presents a unifying explanation of electric and magnetic phenomena underlying our technological society. It is a fundamental physical theory taught in engineering schools at university level. In this theory the electromagnetic field is a vector field permeating space. An important aspect relating to students difficulties and misconceptions is the difficulty in visualizing vector fields. With the goal of enhancing student understanding and studying student engagement we have developed high quality 3D visualizations of electromagnetic situations. These make use of accurate computation of the field lines, together with realistic rendering using the open source software Blender. We present examples of electrostatic situations with both an assessment of the student understanding and an evaluation of the students' perceptions of the importance of the visualizations. Complex interplay between visualization specific issues and the abstract notion of the field is identified in the students' conceptions. It is found that the visualizations are not used as substitutes of other learning resources. They are perceived as allowing a quick access to content and prompting motivation. The adequacy of the visualization to the subject content as well as the capacity to use it as self-assessment is valued by the students.

2001 Annual Conference Proceedings

Visual ElectroMagnetics (VEM) is a 2-D static electromagnetic simulator designed as a visualization aid for students in undergraduate electromagnetic courses. VEM utilizes finite difference techniques in conductive, dielectric, and magnetic environments. The VEM code, written in MATLAB for Windows 95/98, provides an inexpensive, user-friendly graphical interface that is platform independent. VEM consists of a structure window in which the user enters electromagnetic materials and sources via common drawing tools and pop-up menus. The solver button generates the system matrix, solves it, and activates the solutions window in which the results are displayed in a variety of user-selected viewing modes. Though the solution region is finite in extent, a compact simulation of the open boundaries of infinite extent is achieved via the Transparent Grid Termination (TGT). Preliminary evaluations of the enhancement of student learning by VEM are promising. A full demonstration of VEM will be included in the presentation.

This chapter describes learning electromagnetism with visualizations and focuses on the value of concrete and visual representations in teaching abstract concepts. We start with a theoretical background consisting of three subsections: visualization in science, simulations and microcomputerbased laboratory, and studies that investigated the effectiveness of simulations and real-time graphing in physics. We then present the TEAL (Technology Enabled Active Learning) project for MIT’s introductory electromagnetism course as a case in point. We demonstrate the various types of visualizations and how they are used in the TEAL classroom. A description of a large-scale study at MIT follows. In this study, we investigated the effects of introducing 2D and 3D visualizations into an active learning setting on learning outcomes in both the cognitive and affective domains. We conclude by describing an example of TEAL classroom discourse, which demonstrates the effects and benefits of the TEAL project in general, and the active learning and visualizations in particular.

Studying about Electromagnetic Field has many concepts and patterns in it. That’s why it is quite difficult if someone learn just from books, listening to the lecturer or through e- Learning completely. For sustainable education reason, especially in Engineering based education, the institutions encourage their educators to participate and contribute in the e- Learning system to support the subjects and methods to understand how the Electromagnetic Fields works and applications. However, the complexity of the subject brings a confusion and difficulty to understand. As the impact, the students may not optimal to learn the core of Electromagnetic Field subjects. Whereas, understanding about the electromagnetic field has many advantages as fundamental theory for the advanced technology, especially in telecommunication and wireless science. The institution should have the solution to overcome this problem for their students. One of the solution is to visualize the Electromagnetic Field through e- Learning. It’s easier to understand something by visualize the subject. Common people can understand it although they don’t have an engineering science background. Of course, it should be customized to meet certain e-Learning standards and also fulfill the educator’s needs. This paper will explain about the techniques to customize visualization of Electromagnetic Field subjects for e- Learning purposes. Keywords— Electromagnetic Field subjects, e-Learning system, Visualization customizing, educator’s needs.

Journal of Visualization, 2015

This paper presents a novel application of visualizing 3D magnetic field for virtual science experiments. The magnetic field is visualized as streamlines using view-dependent seed template and occlusion buffer. The template is updated according to the viewpoint/magnet movements and determines 3D seed positions. The occlusion buffer enables us to select a subset of the seeds which do not cause cluttered streamlines. Our method has been designed and implemented through teacher survey. A virtual experiment system is built upon the visualization method. It supports user interactions with magnets and compasses and visualizes the magnetic field at real time. The system was experimented in elementary school science classes. The evaluation results show that our method significantly improved the students' capabilities of presenting magnetic field.

Electromagnetic theory presents a difficult task for the student. The essence of the problem is not the pretentious mathematical treating of the field, but in the field presentation and understanding of field interaction with the material. To realize this there has been speculation for alternative means for propagating concepts to understand Electromagnetic theory. Such tools like Virtual Labs enable the student to build in the very simple way an arbitrary problem using preferred geometry and boundary conditions. This report ventures in the domain of Java based applets for a Virtual Lab and different types of applets have been developed and presented.

Students worldwide, find Electromagnetic as an abstract and difficult to comprehend subject. A userfriendly computer aided learning tool for Electromagnetic (CALTEM) has been developed using still graphics and animations. The tool links the fundamental theory with its physical elucidation. The emphasis is on visualizing the basics by explalnlng the desiccated concepts with animations. The tool covers the h d a m e n t a l s of Electromagnetic including electrostatics, electrodynamics and magnetostatics. This paper describes CALTEM breifly.