Software developments by Tristan Miller

You are a battery – electrostatic cannon game

This is a prototype game for teaching certain concepts in electrostatics, in which the player acts as a

kind of battery.

The player must establish a target voltage and maintain it by shooting charged particles from the

plate on the left to the plate on the right.

As charge accumulates on the target plate (the voltage increases) it becomes more difficult to get

charges across the gap due to electrostatic repulsion. If a charge arrives at any plate with too much

Software developments by Tristan Miller

energy, it will scatter charges out of the plate, generally undoing some of player’s hard work. The

energy of the shots must then be carefully adjusted during the game.

The entire time, randomly moving neutral obstacles happily collect excess charge from the plates

and then are accelerated like any other charged particle. These distort the shot trajectories and by

natural means reduce the voltage the player established. The idea is that a voltage produced by a

cell is a result of equilibrium between diffusive processes and reactions that supply unbound charges

to the terminals of the cell.

Several view modes exist to show different kinds of electric field information.

The game will be expanded to include electric circuit challenges – such as maintaining a certain

current while the battery is connected to lamps, resistors, etc.