Physlets are physics applets that are free for non-commercial use and were created by the same team as the Open Source Physics Project. Since their creation at Davidson College in 1998, over 2,000 individual exercises have been created using Physlets for the teaching and learning of astronomy and physics on a variety of levels and a variety of settings. Physlets have also been used in a number of textbooks, and have been translated into a number of languages including: Spanish, Slovenian, German, Hebrew, and Portueguese.
Contents
Recent Developments
On July 1, 2013, the second, all electronic version of the book, Physlets Physics 2E, was released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License on the ComPADRE National Science Digital Library.
Design
Physlets are small, flexible Java applets that can be used in the teaching of physics and other sciences. In particular:
Requirements
Physlets were created using the Java programming language, and they are accessed via a web browser as Java applets. Java Virtual Machines (JVM) are available for many different platforms; Physlets have been tested and run on the Windows, Macintosh (OSX), and Linux platforms.
As "Physlet" is a registered trademark, this word may not be appropriate to name arbitrary Java applet that demonstrates physical laws without approval from the trademark owners.