Show HN: Interactive physics simulations I built while teaching my daughter

Posted by anticlickwise 5 days ago

I started teaching my daughter physics by showing her how things actually work - plucking guitar strings to explain vibration, mixing paints to understand light, dropping objects to see gravity in action.

She learned so much faster through hands-on exploration than through books or videos. That's when I realized: what if I could recreate these physical experiments as interactive simulations?

Lumen is the result - an interactive physics playground covering sound, light, motion, life, and mechanics. Each module lets you manipulate variables in real-time and see/hear the results immediately.

Try it: https://www.projectlumen.app/

Comments

Comment by spuz 1 day ago

Not sure if it's just Firefox, but a lot of things seem to be rendering incorrectly and very slowly for me. The text for the descriptions is very small compared to the rest of the text which makes it kind of hard to read. Also, on the Spectrum demo, the prism is displayed up and to the left of the light rays. After a few minutes the pages just grind to a halt so I can't really explore the rest.

Comment by mzajc 1 day ago

It's not just Firefox, a lot of things are broken. For example, clicking on either ball in "The Falls" moves it up and lets you drag it, but they snap into the same place. The text also reminds me of how ChatGPT writes. Was this made with a LLM?

Comment by rahimnathwani 1 day ago

Kudos! I love seeing things people have built for their kids.

This reminds me a bit of this site, which has been around for a long time and has a similar motivation: teach physics concepts using simulations:

https://phet.colorado.edu/en/simulations/filter?subjects=phy...

Comment by tehlike 1 day ago

Not the same level - but teaching my kid to use keyboard, and i vibecoded this: https://ai.studio/apps/drive/1MErVnhhK89peNh1RPa3y-ufFExG5Bn...

Comment by rahimnathwani 1 day ago

This is cool!

I'm curious whether you're using this to teach initial familiarity, or as the first step toward touch typing?

For touch typing, I think Typing Club is a good place to start for kids. And then Keybr to develop full fluency. And then Monkeytype to develop speed.

EDIT - when I wrote this comment I had only opened the link on my phone. Now I see it on desktop it's clear that the on-screen keyboard is intended to teach key positions without the user looking down at their keyboard. It's good.

Comment by mncharity 1 day ago

In case anyone else was curious, `ai.studio/apps` apps apparently require a google account login by default. Google ai-mode says allowing public access is an author option, but then (1) API costs are borne by the author, and (2) there are some (unclear) compliance implications.

Comment by anticlickwise 1 day ago

This is cool

Comment by mncharity 1 day ago

Two quick errata: In Sound / Biology, a control inversion: low pitch (slider and sound) animates blue short hairs, and high pitch animates long red. In the windtunnel > Wing, lift is reported but the airstream remains undeflected.[1]

[1] randomly, fwiw, I've used cloud deck slicing to illustrate downdraft, eg https://imgur.com/4hhZ7zq https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HIddtgGzDE . Or perhaps moments of "yoink" like... err, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfY5ZQDzC5s&t=154s .

Comment by anticlickwise 1 day ago

Yes. I will have to get the physics right for the air stream. will work on that. Thanks

Comment by tetris11 1 day ago

This is pretty nice! I was quite impressed with the colour mixing one in particular

(At the same time I was reminded a bit by the subtext of the web series Don't Hug Me I'm Scared, especially when pumping the heart to deliver body's needed cargo, like aspic and white sauce -- but that's just my brainrot showing)

I can imagine this being pretty fun on a tablet

Comment by anticlickwise 1 day ago

yes. This was designed for the Ipad

Comment by jastanton 1 day ago

Love this, simulations are great. My nit pick is around how fast these animations are. You blink and you miss it. I can imagine children having more difficult time with this than myself as an adult. (For context I started with the sound animations: The Invisible Dance -- Shape the Wave & The Journey)

Comment by anticlickwise 1 day ago

will work on slowing it down

Comment by admiralrohan 1 day ago

Looking great. Having some context on the pages would be great, I can understand the grass-rabbit-fox dynamics but not clear with the the rest of the simulations.

And you can persist the page in query param. So someone can directly sent people to particular simulation with data.

Comment by anticlickwise 1 day ago

I am adding more context soon.

I will work on the url query param persistence - I know its annoying at the moment

Comment by thimkerbell 1 day ago

Extra points if its homepage can offer informative 80-character descriptions. (What is the term for this (suggested) web design?)

Comment by gfaure 1 day ago

I wish it were possible to link to a particular page (e.g. the optics simulation).

Comment by languid-photic 1 day ago

Fun! Any plan to open source it?

Comment by imtringued 1 day ago

I spotted a bug: "The Tiny City > The Web"

You should use the rabbit emoji instead: https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+1F407