The goal of this Playground Book was to explore how to best explain Newton’s Laws of Motion. I remembered when I was learning these laws in school how difficult to visualise they were, due to the dry, academic way in which they were taught. I wanted a better way. I wanted to visually explain these concepts, using simple interactions and beautiful graphics to keep kids engaged. I decided to use a PlaygroundBook format which would allow text explanations to accompany the interactive part on the right side of the screen.
Initially I started designing planet Earth and the character in Sketch. In the meantime I started experimenting with SpriteKit’s physics in order to setup each scene. While doing this, I thought it would be a fun feature to allow the user to go to Mars, and then see how gravity works on different planets. I also thought it would be a good idea to allow the user to change applied forces and weights to better understand the effect of these.
In order to keep the user engaged, I wanted to show one law per chapter. Each chapter would require the user to make small interactions on screen which would lead to forces being applied on screen, while also allowing certain changes of weight, forces and gravity to be done using functions.
Throughout development I experimented with gravity, mass and applying forces to see how these changes affect events within the Playground. Once I understood the way pin joints worked, I used fixed joints to fix Newton to the cart until the seat ejection would take place. Then I understood how to recognise swipe gestures to remove the fixed joint between Newton and the cart, and apply forces on Newton and the cart to simulate the action and reaction effect.
Then I thought it would be a great feature to present the user with a game where you apply all the tools and knowledge from the previous chapters to achieve a goal. I decided to offer the user choices over the magnitude of their forces, gravity by changing the planet, and cart weight, and play around to observe Newton’s different laws. I think learning needs to be made fun, otherwise it is just boring.
Towards the end of development, I used Tumult Hype in order to create an HTML animation for the Cutscene.