Authoring and assessing Physlet®-based interactive curricular material

The adoption of Internet standards such as HTML and the Java programming language enables the development and deployment of curricular material that can easily be adopted and adapted by others. Physlets, Java applets developed at Davidson College, are based on these standards and are now being used over half a dozen countries. Physlets communicate with a Web browser by employing, a scripting language such as JavaScript, thereby allowing one applet to be used in many different contexts. This feature makes it possible to use a modular approach for the design of curricular material. This paper describes Physlet-based material and presents examples of their use. Additional information is available on the Davidson Physlets site: http://webphysics.davidson.edu/Applets.html.