Integrating interactive simulations into demo sessions to help students visualize the invisible.

The hands‐on demos included with the ASA demo‐kit or “traveling road show” are excellent demonstrations of physical phenomena such as standing wave & resonance (spring, string vibrater, pitch fork, air columns, and wine glass), the force of sound (ultrasonic levitation), and spectrum analysis just to name a few. Most of these demos work with either waves that move so quickly the eye cannot follow (spring appears to be in two places at once) or sound waves in air, which are invisible leaving it up to the students to visualize on their own. Integrating in some interactive simulations such as PhET http://phet.colorado.edu could provide students with the ability to slow time while observing standing waves “Wave on a String” or see the sound waves travel from a speaker to the ear “Sound” and “Wave Interference” or see how individual harmonics (sines and cosines) can create a more complicated sound wave, “Fourier: Making Waves.” These simulations will be demonstrated along with ideas on how to fit them into a f...