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.