A Framework for teaching electromagnetic concepts using mobile devices

A novel pedagogical approach to the teaching of wave phenomena is presented. The growing popularity of smartphones is exploited to provide students with a personal, mobile modelling environment based on the Transmission Line matrix method (TLM). This supports material delivered by more traditional means. There are opportunities for features of the mobile device, together with the software delivery mechanism, to guide students through different levels of complexity in the teaching. This would allow the software on the device to give an accessible, hands-on experience to the students. No significant access to external computing resources is required, limiting the amount of data traffic generated by the use of the software. An initial proof of concept example is described with suggestions for development into a full learning framework.