Maple Program for Studying Physics Phenomena with Applications in Civil Engineering

Abstract

Nowadays, students need adequate software to study Physics in universities and to have high levels of educational achievement and decent test scores. As our experience has demonstrated along the years, the combination of the experimental physics and computational methods motivates students to explore deeper the world of physics phenomena in a modern way. Also, they test their knowledge showing what they have learned.
This paper presents how physics phenomena are really well understood by the students because of using of a powerful algebra system like Maple 17. Also, the Maple 17 program it is a useful tool for solving physics problems. The Graphics package of Maple 17 program has been used for the applications at the laboratories and the seminars of the Physics I and Physics II courses that are designated to the first and second semesters, respectively at the Faculty of Civil Engineering and Building Services of “Gheorghe Asachi†Technical University.
The versatility and the wide range of applications of Maple 17 make it a powerful tool in assisting the students for solving problems and drawing graphs. This algebra system also provides many applications in engineering. Also, a platform as Maple presents advantages like speed, flexibility and many graphical facilities. For this reasons we consider the Maple program to be a reliable tool for teaching and learning physics.
In our work we present some examples of plotting the displacement and speed for damped systems. The plot command that creates a two-dimensional plot and the plots[animate] command that generates an animation are both used for making the graphs in the case of overdamped, critically damped and underdamped systems, respectively. Using this powerful algebra system the students will work faster and a deeper understanding of the differences between the three cases of damped systems will be developed.