Having managed to finish off Body of Evidence in about ten days, I'm ready to tackle the fifth and final STEM Behind Hollywood activity, Science Friction!. Nearly equal in simplicity to Earth Impact!, the Science Friction! activity includes many text pages, a few images and diagrams, and what appears to be a very, very simple simulation. As always, the development process includes transcribing and delineating the text, adapting and converting the images, and building the necessary code. For the first time, I'm adding the ability to inline images anywhere on the last screen of text pages, so that I can add the mathematical formulae with things like mu and subscripts. Here's a sampling of what I have so far:

*bump* Work continues. Thanks to tifreak8x's efforts in screenshotting the original TI-Nspire activity, I have completed the first section of the port, which is nearly half of the total activity. I have also made significant headway on the second section, and am at the final "hard" part of the activity, the simulation. I must admit that I'm a little disappointed with the quality of the original TI-Nspire Science Friction activity compared to the previous four I've ported. Many images have text that is unreadably small on the TI-Nspire CX, one text page has space for a (missing) image, there are a number of grammatical errors in the text, and the "simulation" portion uses different names for the weapons (freeze ray vs. ice ray, water vial vs. water gun, oil can vs. oil gun) in the text and pictures.

Edit: Another error: the page before a table of static friction coefficients calls it a table of kinetic friction coefficients.

That is somewhat disappointing, as you would expect these programs to be thoroughly screened. Looks like images are now on the same page as text! 🙂 Good luck, and, as usual, looking fancy!

Kerm, the speed with which you are getting these done continues to amaze me!

Thank you for the encouragement, guys. 🙂 I've transcribed just about all the text, and I'm really only dragging my feet on one image page and one "simulation". For the simulation, I'm really not happy with the clarity; I'm probably going to try to bump up the contrast and pick a more xLIBC-friendly background color (left).

Edit: I made some image adjustments and re-exported the images, and I think they're clearer now (right). I'll add the rest of the interface for this "simulation".

Those are some pretty awesome looking shots 😁 And very glad to have been able to help you along with by screenshotting while you were working on the zombie ones 🙂 I hope you'll have these ready and rehearsed well enough to present at that conference!

Very much so: your email containing the screenshots from this fifth and final activity was a very pleasant surprise. In other news, I'm happy with how the "simulation" looks now, so I just need to fix up the other image page and start proofreading.

*bump* I've unfortunately been completely dragging my feet on working on this. My 3D printing adventures, Fallen London, and most importantly, my PhD work have all been keeping me from making much progress on this. I have, however, finished the final image page, so I need to read through it one more time looking for errors, then possibly release a beta for you guys to look at if you'll be so kind while I work on converting the teacher and student notes.



Edit: I completed the proofreading yesterday, made some changes and updates, and today I've been working on the notes. So far, I've completed the student handout, and later in the day I hope to complete the teacher handout and release a beta.

Edit #2: Found another error. In the teacher handout, it asks for the acceleration when F=10N and m=1.02kg. Unless I'm crazy, F=ma, a=F/m, a=10/1.02, a=9.8 m/s^2. The handout gives the answer as a=10.2 m/s^2.

*bumpity bump* It's been over 36 hours, so I'm excusing myself for the bump. In addition, I have a beta available! As always, if you could run through the whole activity, especially with the student handout and answering the questions, I would be very grateful. Any and all corrections, useability feedback, grammatical and spelling fixes, and functionality bug reports are welcome.

Download
[Beta] Science Friction Activity for TI-84 Plus C SE

Nice work Kerm! 😁 I found no bugs or spelling issues when I went through it, although there may be some I missed because of my horrendous spelling. 😛 Only thing in the readme: "2015 Jan 22: Development begun": Is it began?

In other words, it looks great! This means that the STEM ports are complete, correct? 🙂

Great job on another port of of the STEM Behind Hollywood activities!

I see that you copied and pasted the readme again.... The Image Credits need to be updated. SCIFRICT.8xp is also not the Body of Evidence program. 😉

Throughout the program, you either include or omit a space between the number and unit. (e.g. 12 N or 12N)

On the page 3 diagram, I think the motion vector is supposed to be moved down. This picture is also used in the PDFs.


I'm not sure but there might be a verb tense error. Again, I'm not 100% sure of this one.


This does not make sense.

I found no errors in the PDFs after I did a quick scan.

Makes sense to me, but that could just be me. 😛 I believe "us" refers to mu (μ), and is the coefficient of static friction. 🙂

There's an omitted "was" in that sentence fragment: "Development [was] begun".

That's correct! I plan to make a big deal about that; I think it's time to create a video or six about that fact. 😉

You're correct! Unfortunately, I can't print a mu with xLIBC. I was hoping the formula immediately following would make up for that.

Thank you!

Argh, hoisted by my copy-pasting again.

I'll do a scan through and look for that.

It's supposed to not be attached to the box, to make it clear it's representing a result of the forces on the box, not a force itself.

I believe this tense is correct.

Awesome. Your help has been particularly consistent and invaluable. 🙂