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EZ Math Movie is an easy to use Web animation application that is used to visualize mathematics. It allows you to create, control, and experiment with diagrams and graphs of many types of math and physics equations.
EZ Math Movie allows you to play with the mathematics. You can apply simple variations to a math formula and quickly see the effects on the shape of an (x, y) graph, a diagram, or some printer output. This interaction almost always leads to a better understanding of how the mathematics works.
No, not at all. Knowing the details of the EZ Math Movie language is optional at Zona Land Education. You can run EZ Math Movie applications without even looking at the underlying programing. However, if you want to, learning a simple computer language and seeing how it is used to demonstrate mathematics and physics can deepen your understanding, especially if you experiment a bit.
EZ Math Movie will be used on this site to create most future interactive animations and calculators. You will work with these simply by clicking buttons, much like what is done with the material that has always been in Zona Land Education. However, there will be one extra checkbox. It will be labeled 'Show system'. Click on it, and the EZ Math Movie system is presented. Uncheck it, and the system disappears.
The details of the EZ Math Movie language are described on its home site: ezmathmovie.com.
Below is a simple EZ Math Movie. It plots a point on an (x, y) graph. Click the '+' and '-' buttons within the input boxes for the x- and y-coordinates and notice how the point moves about the graph accordingly. You are using an EZ Math Movie without knowing anything about its underlying system, just as you may have often done with other educational applications on many pages throughout this site.
However, going further, click the 'Show system' check box, and the EZ Math Movie system will be exposed. Uncheck it to hide the system again.
When the EZ Math Movie system is exposed, check the 'Loop' checkbox that becomes visible at the top of the system. A text box will appear, and it will hold the language code that shows the logic for this application. Of course, you need to understand the EZ Math Movie language to follow what is going on here, but, again, that is not necessary to just use the application.
This example is very easy. It is meant to introduce how this all works and to clearly demonstrate that one can use an EZ Math Movie without understanding the language. You really do not have to show the system to use the system.
Also, this first EZ Math Movie does not have any ongoing animation. Again, it is a simple starting point.
Often, in Zona Land Education we will be using EZ Math Movie to demonstrate physics formulas and mathematics in general. For example, soon there will be applications that show how kinematics formulas track an object's motion or how the variables within an equation control a function's transformations. Clicking the 'Show system' checkbox and reading the code (which looks a lot like ordinary mathematics equations) can really help your understanding of topics like these. If you think changing a certain variable in a certain way will cause a certain effect on the graph, well, change it and check things out. You will see if it does what you think it should have done, or not. This interactive, experimental cycle can advance your understanding well beyond what is usually gained with paper and pencil, or even with graphic calculators. Learning math and physics with a computer language is fun.
The EZ Math Movies here will show up throughout the whole site. In the future EZ Math Movies will be the standard way that diagrams and animations will be presented at Zona Land Education. They will be taking over the kinds of presentations now handled by Java, Flash, and VRML. Eventually, many current diagrams will be replaced with EZ Math Movies.
New EZ Math Movies will be shown in the 'New items' section, like all new material. The first, and quite simple, EZ Math Movies are here:
If you want to learn the EZ Math Movie language, it is not difficult to learn. It is all explained at ezmathmovie.com, a sister site to Zona Land Education written by Ed Zobel, the author of both sites.
The pages holding EZ Math Movies are formatted, basically, as a stream of rectangles, each holding a paragraph or two of information. These spill across the display left to right, top to bottom. These rectangles are called 'eyefuls'. They are meant to present material clearly on many devices, including phones, tablets, and computer monitors. If two eyefuls fit across your phone's display, well, that is what you will see before the material wraps around and down the page. If you are looking into a big computer monitor, and six eyefuls can go across the screen, then that is what you will see before the eyefuls wrap and go further down the page. Hopefully, this method will work well with small and big displays alike.
EZ Math Movie is an extension of Javascript. Javascript is a language that is used on the Web and is present in all modern browsers. More about that at the EZ Math Movie site.
The Javascript in EZ Math Movie examples is safe to run on your computing device. However, since EZ Math Movie allows you to change that code, please heed a simple, common sense warning: Do not accept Javascript code that you do not understand from an untrusted source and run it on an EZ Math Movie example. It may be possible for someone to write malicious Javascript code and convince another person, possibly you, to enter it into an EZ Math Movie example and run it. If you really want to run untrusted code that you do not understand, then be sure to read our disclaimer.
