An interactive Java-based educational module in electromagnetics

International Journal of Electrical Engineering Education, Jan 2003 by Chetty, M, Hu, S, Bennett, J

Conclusions

Electromagnetics is perceived as one of the most difficult courses in engineering due to its extensive mathematical content. The use of interactive multimedia tools incorporating animation effects can allow students to have a graphical display of abstract quantities such as fields, potentials and help visualization, thus making the subject easier to understand. This paper presents a web-based interactive module for electromagnetics. It is designed and implemented using Java applets, Perl scripts and MATLAB. Clicking buttons, such as 'Display result', and multimedia features such as the audio files are also included in various applets for stimulating the user's sound senses. The module contains not only the tutorial and the simulation components but also incorporates animation effects. Design and implementation schemes for interactive simulation studies for two topics, namely 'electric dipole' and 'experimental mapping' are also presented. all the graphical plots and the animation results are displayed directly on the browser.

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M. Chetty1, S. Hu2 and J. Bennett2

1Gippsland School of Computing and Information Technology, Monash University, Churchill, Australia

2Department of Electrical and Computer Systems Engineering, Monash University, Clayton, Australia

E-mail: Madhu.Chetty@infotech.monash.edu.au .