Show HN: Interactive physics simulations I built while teaching my daughter(www.projectlumen.app)
83 pointsby anticlickwise5 days ago13 comments
  • rahimnathwania 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...

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

      • mncharitya 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.
      • anticlickwise13 hours ago
        This is cool
  • spuza 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.
    • mzajca 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?
  • mncharitya 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 .

    • anticlickwise13 hours ago
      Yes. I will have to get the physics right for the air stream. will work on that. Thanks
  • jastantona 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)
  • tetris11a 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

  • admiralrohana 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.

    • anticlickwise13 hours ago
      I am adding more context soon.

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

  • thimkerbella day ago
    Extra points if its homepage can offer informative 80-character descriptions. (What is the term for this (suggested) web design?)
  • gfaurea day ago
    I wish it were possible to link to a particular page (e.g. the optics simulation).
  • imtringued10 hours 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

  • languid-photica day ago
    Fun! Any plan to open source it?
  • nemath19 hours ago
    Very cool!
  • vibefarma day ago
    wholesome :)
  • animanoira day ago
    [dead]