Physion is a 2D Physics simulation software. It can be used to easily create a wide range of
interactive physics simulations and
educational experiments.
Teachers may find it particularly useful since it can be used as a
virtual physics laboratory through which they can demonstrate some basic
physics concepts in the classroom.
Using its tools you can create various
physical objects on a scene. You can for example create circles,
rectangles, polygons, gears, chains, ropes, balloons and lots of other
physics items. You can also connect those items using springs, pulleys,
nails and other types of joints. This way you can create various
scenes/scenarios which range from simple educational experiments to
complex structures and mechanisms.
Apart from the classic saving/loading of scenes, Physion also supports uploading/downloading scenes
to and from a central repository. Once an interesting scene has been
created, the user can upload it to this repository and it will be
immediately available for downloading to all other users that are using
Physion.
Physion also supports scripting with Javascript.
This means that the users can write their own scripts and execute them
through Physion´s scripting engine. Most of the actions that can be
performed through the graphical user interface have their equivalent
javascript commands. This way Physion can also act as a fun and friendly
platform for introduction to basic programming concepts.
Finally, Physion may be particularly useful to game developers since they can use it as simple level editor for their platform games.
The program has been translated into 7
languages (English, Greek, Russian, Japanese, German, Spanish and
Indonesian) and is available both for Windows and Linux (32 and 64bit)
