The main goal of our activity was creating an educational digital object which would simulate the breaking of a vehicle in certain speeds on given surfaces in order to understand the terms as “reaction time” or a “breaking distance,” and to learn all the factors on which the breaking distance is dependent.
Our motivation for creation of the object was for the future drivers to gain an idea of how fast they can drive on a given surface to still safely stop before an obstacle. It can also be used for more practical purposes such as safe road crossing.
The object is designed so that there is a very distinctive ratio between the speed of a vehicle and its breaking distance. It is also filled with concrete data about the breaking distance calculated from the quadratic dependence of the distance based on input parameters.
What we have done
In order to simulate the breaking distance the educational interactive object was created. Students choose speed of a vehicle and the states of roads such as:
- Dry
- Wed
- In snow
After the simulation is activated the vehicle starts braking on a marked spot on a road. During the braking the reaction pathway and the braking path are shown in a form of tire tracks. After the veicle is fully stopped the animation is supplied with calculated reaction pathway, breaking distance and a total distance needed to stop a vehicle.
How we did it
We chose the environment Adobe Flash to assemble the interactive animation. It enables fairly simple graphical designing and contains built-in programming language ActionScript to calculate the details to create the animation.
The most difficult part of the development was to show the breaking distance and to adapt the animation to the input and calculated data.
The digital learning object was build by this worksheet.
Subject: Authoring systems and environments
By Petr Zlatohlávek