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Education

High School + Physics + Linux = ? 74

Posted by Cliff from the we-need-more-penguins-in-high-schools dept.
earlums25 asks: ""I'm a high school physics teacher stuck in a school where not only is Windows rampant, but the sysadmin isn't interested in alternatives. I want to present a case where my students could use Linux boxes instead of Windows for the purpose of showing them there are alternatives. The major obstacle is that I haven't found software for Linux that would take the place of 'Precision Timer,' a piece of software that allows students to connect photogates through a Pasco 6500 interface. The software would need to recognize the input signal which comes in through the Pasco interface (a 1/4 inch plug connected the gameport), record time, plot data, print/save data and plots, and do basic calculation of speeds, accelerations, averages and standard deviations. Any ideas?"
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High School + Physics + Linux = ? More

High School + Physics + Linux = ?

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  • Sounds lie... (Score:1, Redundant)

    by Anztac ( 322182 )
    ..A good project for your computer science deparment ;o) Maybe one or two students in your class would have the interest/skills to make this program?

  • Hmm... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Screaming Lunatic ( 526975 ) on Monday September 16, 2002 @05:10PM (#4268737) Homepage
    How about asking Pasco to support Linux?

    I've written tons of drivers for little components like that. It shouldn't be too hard to do. The software on top of the driver is another story. It might take a while to implement depending on the feature set required.

  • ObClassicVariationOfOldJoke (Score:4, Funny)

    by Deagol ( 323173 ) on Monday September 16, 2002 @05:10PM (#4268740) Homepage
    Q: How do you accelerate a Windows box?

    A: 9.8 m/s^2

    (rimshot)

    • Someone actually send me an e-mail asking me how to accelerate his computer using windows.

      I replied with the following:
      1) Open window
      2) Pick up computer
      3) Throw computer out of windows
      4) Viola - 9.8m/s^2 acceleration!

  • Drivers (Score:3, Interesting)

    by MrResistor ( 120588 ) <.peterahoff. .at. .gmail.com.> on Monday September 16, 2002 @05:10PM (#4268741) Homepage
    Drivers would seem to be the big hurdle. Once you have the data in the system the calculations are pretty simple. Heck, even I could write a program to do them (it would be CLI, though). Have you check with the manufacturer to see if they offer Linux drivers?

    • There should be no need to write drivers, actually. As long as you have a joystick driver for your sound card (which should already exist), you can just write a program that poll()s the game port for its status. I did something similar with my serial port in order to record the signals sent out by my various remote controls. I got accuracy on the order of a few microseconds.
      • Isn't that basically writing drivers?
      • This is apparently not just some photogates, but some sort of black box which sits between the photogates and the PC, which could easily have some proprietary data formats and such. I suspect your technique would work as long as they were then able to decode the data.

        My personal approach would be to just get some photogates, wire them up to a parallel cable, and write some simple code like you describe. That seems like it would be a lot easier than trying to deal with somebody elses black box crap.

      • I used the pasco stuff in my HS physics class... the sensors (there are digital and analog) terminate into an interface box... which has a SCSI interface. We used Windows 95 back in the day for the client, but this stuff was originally written for the Mac (you could tell how poorly the '95 interface was harnessed during the port from Mac -> Windows).

        Shoot, a few recycled Mac IIci's would do the trick...

  • Too much free time? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Glonoinha ( 587375 ) on Monday September 16, 2002 @05:16PM (#4268771) Journal
    Without sounding harsh, your OS is a means, not an end. Looking over the details again, you have an existing solution that a) works, b) is supported by your existing staff, c) is already paid for ... am I correct thus far?

    You are teaching Physics, so teach Physics. I agree with you, alternative OS's exist and are often viable, occasionally superior to what is being used but you are trying to impose your religious views (OS Holy Wars) on young impressionable minds (I commend you on that, get em while they are young) in a classroom completely unrelated to operating systems, computers, religious freedom, etc. Additionally, you are trying to shoehorn the new OS where it isn't an obvious (nor an excellent) fit - the tools are not readily available.

    What would you say when the biology teacher came to you with the following dilemma - they already have microscopes, paid for, supported by the current staff, that are working ... but she wanted to use a different brand of microscope to 'show the students that alternatives exist.' Probably tell her to go teach some biology after asking if she had entirely too much free time.

    If you want to teach alternative OS's, offer to create a new class, or even an after-school workshop. That way you could dedicate the needed resources (your time, efforts) to the computer side without getting the Physics in the middle of it.

    • That said ... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Glonoinha ( 587375 )
      You could always use a Wintel box for data collection, then have the Wintel box pass the data to your Linux box either real time or staged (store it to a file, have the Linux box go fetch it) and then process the file on your Linux box.

      This kills three birds with one stone -
      1. instant solution, the data aquisition issue is resolved,
      2. if IT comes in you can point to the Windows box and they will be happy,
      3. you get to demonstrate alernative OS's, even demonstrate interoperability techniques.
    • I have to agree with the your OS works, what's the problem and your a physics teacher, why is chosing an OS in your curriculum speeches.

      I'd like to honestly ask the submitter why Linux is so important to his Physics ciriculum. I'm sure the system admin will ask the same question.

      Now if you were a CS teacher, I'd see your point, but a physics professor? Sorry, chum. OS Theory isn't a physics thing.
    • I also agree. Yes for a CS class this would be an ace way to write a simple device driver(you did say gameport right). It might even work if you didn't turn on all those server deamons that come with linux. I notice the firm sell USB sensors, why not write the stuff for OSx on a Mac? eh? not a real computer? Come to think of it whats wrong with OpenVMS?
  • I'm in college and taking my second calculus based physics course (E&M/Optics) and we never had photogates! Use a stopwatch
    • >Use a stopwatch You had stopwatches? Dang! We had one of the autistic students in the corner going 'One Mississippi, Two Mississippi, Three Mississippi, Four Mississippi ...'
      • Haha. Thats quite the timer.
        I think my least favorite labs were the one that used a "spark timer" that sparked 10 times per second and we accelerated a cart with the spark hitting a piece of "spark tape" as it went and then measured the distances between them. However, we did have some little cameras that hooked to the computer and we used "Videopoint" to do all of that stuff, that was pretty interesting.
    • Go to a real school!

      Even my junior college physics department has photogates!

    • When I took a Freshman Physics Lab 4 years ago at a VERY large university (which wishes to remain anonymous), we had the worst recording-devices: Apple IIe's. Connected to a dual disc recording device (one disc serves as a platform, the other rotates freely and is optically tracked), these things produced pages and pages of disc speed measurements, resulting in a minor headache trying to read and subsequently graph the results in Excel.

      Man, am I glad that's over. From what I hear, they just replaced that system last year with early-Pentium boxen...
    • In my physics class, we had this one lab where we had two magnetic hockey pucks collide on an air table, Whe had a polaroid camera that had sort of a fan device on front of it so that when you took a picture over an extended period of time you would get several pictures overalapped on each other, a picture every 10 ms. we then had to figure out the scale of the picture and then use the known time delay to figure out the speed of the pucks and then prove that momentum was conservered. The algebra based physics people had the pasco stuff next door. Another lab we had had to do with something about falling weights and a rotational inertia of a pendulum or something and we had this tape attached to the weights that went through a spark generator so there was a mark on the tape for every spark that happened at like every 10 ms and we had to show the accelration of the wieghts and then prove that it concides with the inertia of pendulum as calcuated by integrating over all the points of the pendelum. Our physics teacher told us it was good for us.
  • A 1/4in plug connected to the gameport? I guess I dont quite understand what this is...

    I dont see why this couldnt be built using fairly easy-to-come-by components - IE, an IR LED, an IR Detector simply connected by paralell port. While the detector is true, keep counting, if its false, your beam got broken and you can count that as you need. The software would be rather simple. The hardest part will be doing the polling to the accuracy you need.

    Shrug... Unless there is anything special that hardware can do that you cant recreate simply, do it that way.

    In highschool the hardware we were using was on the Mac. Dont think its at all device dependent.

    Heck, get ambitious and work on getting a plotting function too.

    If theres a CS department at the school I bet you could get some help developing some of the routines, save the device driver.
    • The 1/4 in plug goes into a box that outputs onto a SCSI interface. The pasco software was originally written for the Mac and ported to the PC.

  • Uhm, I don't get it? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by delus10n0 ( 524126 ) on Monday September 16, 2002 @05:47PM (#4268984)
    If it's working with Windows, why not use Windows? Why do you have to show there are "alternatives"? What benefit does this have on the students?

    • Re:Uhm, I don't get it? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by 4of12 ( 97621 )

      If it's working with Windows, why not use Windows?

      That's a very good question, one that another poster hit on as well. If it works, stick with it.

      That's all fine and good if you want to stick safely with the status quo. If you think the status quo is perfect, can't be improved upon, and can be relied upon to serve your needs satisfactorily forever more, then, by all means, stick with status quo.

      To my mind, a genuine educational experience includes constant probing at the limits of knowledge, questioning the status quo, looking for other ways of doing things, trying different things, and digging into the fundamentals of how things work in ways that "black box" approaches can not satisfy completely.

      Having teachers with such attitudes is important in fostering the same kind of enthusiasm for new ideas in their students. When I'm 80 years old, I'll appreciate having students with questioning minds and broad problem-solving skills, not willing to capitulate to the status quo too easily. My medical care will depend upon researchers with that same kind of attitude making discoveries over the next several decades. I don't want them to be satisfied with the status quo.

      As an aside, in the long term there's evidence that schools will end up paying substantial money to maintain the status of their Microsoft License Agreements. If there's anything true about most high schools, it's that there is never enough money to go around to achieve all the goals that people would like. Given a choice between spending money on Licensing 6 and spending money on teachers for drama, art, physics, foreign languages, I think many schools would love to be able to choose the latter if they thought they had a choice.

      I commend this H.S. physics teacher for looking into open alternatives. Not just because it will introduce his students to a broadening experience (Macs would be good here, too), but because it helps open the door a little further in allowing his school to at least have a choice in the future, rather than be summarily locked into a all-MS "solution".

  • Shut up and teach (Score:3, Insightful)

    by NevarMore ( 248971 ) on Monday September 16, 2002 @06:13PM (#4269107) Homepage Journal
    For all you ferriners this is why american schools suck. Teachers are more concerned (perhaps its the politicians and the wannabe politicians in the school administration) with how to teach using the newest toys rather than how to teach with what they know and more importantly what to teach.

    In high school (but a few years ago) I had a great physics teacher that used whatever she needed to use to teach us. We were doing some speed and sounds based experimentation and for the recording hardware she had there were existing drivers for the science lab macs that were a good 4 - 5 years old, so thats what we used. No one gave two shits that it was on a Mac, we were there to learn physics and my teacher was there to teach it, not press her personal preferences for OS during class time.

    On the contrary, in my calculus class the teacher tried to use computers and teach a large group of non-technical people to program thier calculators (ti-83 was the standard) to do the calc for them. Now i can see this as being a good thing to save us the tedium of solving a more basic problem as part of a new problem to isolate the concepts of the new material. However, we lost a full 3 DAYS of class time fucking with the calculators which would have been better spent teaching us. Now I really didnt mind sitting in the corner taking 15 minutes to poke the program in then playing nibbles or drugwar for the next 2.5 classes...

    My point is that there is no reason for you to change the technological base of a class/cirriculum UNLESS that change will help to illustrate a concept and teach your students. If there was some whiz-bang hot shit program or hardware that was linux only, then by all means please put it in place, but make damn sure it works without fail. A student having to make up a lab or stay late because you had to go dink with someing in /etc or recompile a kernel defeats the purpose of using the new toys.
  • Both PASCO & Vernier offer Macintosh software for their hardware. Much if not all of their software will work with Mac System 6.08 through MacOS 9.2, and I believe in Classic mode under MacOS X. My suspision is that your school might have an older Mac lurking about in the wings. If so, then you could download the PASCO software that would work with that old Mac.

    FWIW
    • I'm a high school physics teacher stuck in a school where not only is Windows rampant, but the sysadmin isn't interested in alternatives. I want to present a case where my students could use Linux boxes instead of Windows for the purpose of showing them there are alternatives.

    Are you serious? What does this have to do with physics?

    And why replace working Windows computers with non-working Linux ones for the purpose of showing alternatives?

    You people are crazy. At least the aforementioned sysadmin is seeing some sense.
  • What kind of information does the device send on the joystick port? Is it analog, across the axis lines, or digital, across the button lines? How should the data be interpreted? What happens when you try to treat the device as an actual joystick and calibrate it with the Windows control panel (assuming you're using Windows 95 or later)?

    With more information, an open source developer such as myself could probably whip up a user-space driver that uses the generic Linux joystick API in a day's worth of spare time, without even needing the hardware.

    There's already gnuplot to graph the datapoints once they've been acquired, too, or I've got lots of experience writing graphics stuff (I've written a 3D modeller, a 2D/3D function grapher, a linux framebuffer graphics library [sourceforge.net], some undistributed xmms plugins, ...)...

  • showing alternatives (Score:4, Insightful)

    by bedessen ( 411686 ) on Monday September 16, 2002 @07:04PM (#4269385) Journal
    I agree with your sentiment that it is good to show these kids that the world of computers does not equate to Microsoft Word and Microsoft Internet Explorer running on Microsoft Windows. Most ordinary computer users probably spend 90% of their time using these or some other small handful of apps, and it's easy to assume that's all there is to computers if you've never experienced anything else.

    But, I don't think this is the proper setting to demonstrate this idea. The whole point of alternatives is choosing the best solution for the task at hand. Here you've got a case where the alternate tool does not have the necessary functionality, at least not without extra development work. It doesn't have support from any of the administation, and indeed would probably draw some degree of negativity. And it's not saving any money or other resources, because clearly the Windows PCs and their software have already been purchased, configured, and work just fine.

    Don't force the square peg in the round hole. There are many times when the alternatives make sense, and this is not one of them.

    What you should instead do is find a task to which Linux and free software are suited. Try having an assignment where the kids use Octave or gnuplot or something like that to analyze their data. Surely there's some task that would require the purchase of non-free software for Windows that can be done with free software on Linux. It doesn't even have to be a very involved task, but perhaps if you had the basic skeleton/framework script setup and the kids just enter their data and get an advanced analysis.

    If it doesn't violate policy, offer to also let the kids use this linux computer in between classes or after school, to surf the web or type assignments or whatever. Surely you will get a few curious kids that want to screw around on it since it's different. A few might want to use it if other labs are full, or they don't have a computer at home, or it's simply convenient at the time, or whatever. Point is, they'll get some exposure even if it's not an integral part of the class (i.e., not driving your lab hardware.)
  • In a physics class, worry about physics, not operating systems. Take more time to prepare better demonstrations, good jokes and more interesting material. Get the kids interested in the subject matter at hand. Prepare better for class or learn to be a better speaker. The world would be a better place if kids had a greater appreciation for the pure sciences. Go read A Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan and think about it.

  • Linux can play a role in a HS physics class, but it's not here.

    Where Linux (or any Unix) shines is collecting real time data over long periods of time. Windows, at least the most brain-dead versions, were actually better for collecting data over short periods of time since the data logging program could take over the system. But short of dedicated embedded OSes nothing can be Unix/Linux for low-profile systems that can log data for months without ever requiring a reboot, it can simultaneously run data collection, analysis and publication programs, etc. Windows (short of NT) has proven remarkably inept at this.

    The problem is that there's not a whole lot you can do in a HS physics lab that requires collecting data over such long periods. The late "Amateur Scientist" column in Scientific American had a lot of great ideas, but they are real science. At the HS level, you need trivial experiements that can be performed and understood by the average HS physics student. (I know, some of them could do the experiments mentioned, or better yet inspired, but that column. But only a small number of these students.)
  • Whether you choose Linux or Windows is rather OT to physics.

    However, you could use the inertia metaphor to describe why Windows dominates.
  • Get the computer teacher to get some class to write the software for the darned thing.

  • Those photogates have a resolution of 100 microseconds. Any I/O port that can do 10,000 samples a second or better is good enough.

    You can measure events that accurately with the gameport, sound card, parallel port or even a serial port.

    The photogate has a simple 3 wire digital interface. I betcha that the 3 wires are ground, +5volts and a logic level output. If you can't find the interface documentation on the web, you can use a voltmeter or oscilliscope to figure out the signal.

    Here's a way to use the serial port as an accurate timer, even if your OS has terrible latency. Connect a 40 kohm resistor between data out and data in of the serial port. Drive the input of an opto isolator off of your photogate (which is an also opto-isolator, but I like redundancy). Use the opto-isolator to pull data in to +5 through a 1kohm resistor.

    So when the opto isolator is off, data will flow through the serial port, when it is on, data won't flow. When the isolator switches, it will corrupt a character. Send an easy to decode series of characters down the serial port, say, 00000001:00000002: etc... Dump the data to a file. See what characters are missing to tell when the isolator is on.

    At 115kbaud, each bit is 8.68 microseconds, each character is 86.8 microseconds. So character level timing is good enough, you don't even have to look at the bits of corrupted characters. You can look at those bits for more precision.

    Figuring out speeds and accelarations from raw timing data is an excellent project for physics students.

    • That's totally brillant!!

      The students can easily explore that, while the comment submitter (if up to the task) can pull together the necessary code and/or lab equipment to have a custom-made presentation that could be extremely informative.

      Some one mod this parent up!!!
  • Yeah, teach physics!

    Unless you can tell me some good advantage of using linux (other than "showing them there are alternatives"), don't do it...

    Your sysadmin is right. He has given you a solution that works, you use it. End of story.

    Is there some specific linux software you want to use? Are you sure it can't run on Windows? Or has good alternatives that run on Windows? Sounds to me you are just trolling your sysadmin *and* your students.

    Hell, why not go all the way, and insist on a AS/400-only solution, just to show them that there are alternatives, right?

    Or better yet, buy a class-set of gameboys (and one of those eprom burners), and develop a data-collection solution for them in assembly language. Now, that's an alternative nobody would think about.

    But of course, if you want a real computer, you should buy a real game-console, maybe a Dreamcast running NetBSD would be the ideal solution. I'm sure it could be made to work, and your students would surely be much wiser about "alternatives".

    But of course, the best solution would be to set up a cluster of bluetooth-enabled java-cellphones that communicate over ipx to do the calculations and display, and let a C64 with a soldered on modern gameport to do the data-collection. Of course, you will need to distribute the data to the cluster through the C64's serial-port to a laptop runnin OS/2, which can convert the signal into something the bluetooth-devices can understand. Extra credits if you can make all the cellphones display a large graph by putting their displays next to each other. Don't mention linux, most students have already heard about it, remember, it's alternatives we are looking for, right?

    Or you could just teach physics...

  • The project you are looking for is called RealTime linux.
    I had a physiology professor in Boston who was using this in precision timing experiments. "RTLinux was created to resolve what has long been considered an inescapable dilemma: to produce a simple real-time system that does not restrict access to the power of hardware platforms." A company called FSMLabs now supports it. See: http://www.fsmlabs.com/community/ Check out the projects page for good examples of what this can be used for (mostly situations where you have to measure real-world events in picoseconds.)
  • I love Linux and would think this would be a fun project if.
    1. You where getting new computers.
    2. If there was some great open source tools that only work on Linux.
    3. You had gotten a bunch of hand me down systems that just didn't cut it but could work using Linux.
    You are supposed to teach Physics. If you have a computer program in your school they should be teaching that they are other OS's not you.
    If you want to do write an Open source solution for other schools to use I think that would be great but right now teach them Physics.

  • Why don't you think of it as a project - in the longer term? I agree with others who have said that you should use the right tool for the job, you are after all teaching physics.

    But it's also true that in most physics labs, one of the daily tasks is writing data collection and instrument control software. While a lot of that is done using LabView, I see no reason --at least in a teaching setting where the needs are fairly basic-- not to try an alternative.

    So what I suggest you do is to consider having a 'computational experimental physics' project whose ultimate goal is writing precisely such software. It would give your students _extremely_ valuable experience, and would show them first hand what I consider to be Linux's biggest strength. To me the power of Linux isn't so much that it's free, but that out of the box you get every language, compiler and development tool under the sun.

    So get your students involved, and think of it as a great opportunity to learn how to write a small C library to read data off that port, probably coupled with a Numeric Python back end for data processing and a PyQt front end for the plotting and control (perhaps driving a Gnuplot window).

    That's what I would do at least.

    Cheers.
  • Before we totaly bash this person consider nearly everyone with a physics major has some deal of of experience with *nix. Learning to use some version is an important part of educating future physical scientists. Physics and Linux practically go hand in hand because we are always squezing money and always using big servers.

    Maybe the students AND the teacher should work on this project of porting to Linux since nearly every physics dept requires programming computer experience beyond the usual MS programs of the masses.
  • If the tasco stuff is anything like the TI calculators + 3rd party hardware + software we used in my high school physics class, it will be incredibly easy to port. Since most of the software required to decode the input was loaded onto the calculator (and was not compiled, so you could read the source), the only thing that required porting was the graph-link software, which somebody had already ported What it sounds like you have is a simple serial interface, so if you could just get the specifications for the output from tasco, i'm sure any decent programmer could port the software to linux in less than a weeks worth of time.

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