Torque

The computer is slowly replacing pen and paper used in school to take notes. This allows for a more efficient method of learning. Moreover, with the help of specialized applications you can put in practice what you are thought in school, without the risk of any injury. Torque is a suitable example of such utilities that let you experiment and analyze force interactions.

The application's design is kept simple enough to let anyone quickly accommodate. There are four main tabs you can access, each giving you the possibility to gather data according to various simulations.

In order to get an idea of what the application puts at your disposal, the first tab offers a suitable testing ground, intuitively called “Intro”. Most effort required on your behalf is to spin a wheel on which you get to place two bugs and gather info regarding torque, angular acceleration and momentum, moment of inertia.

The tabs that follow are similar in design, but provide different info. The environment from the first tab follows you everywhere, representing the main means of triggering data collection. By careful placement of bugs on the wheel and pulling it in the desired direction and depending on the active tab, acting forces are displayed in graphs that update in real-time.

What's more, you can add a ruler, enable velocity and acceleration vectors, and even completely stop the simulation and run it step-by-step for close analysis of the whole experiment. Unfortunately, there is no implemented option that lets you export gathered data to a file, so you must keep a text editor ready in case you need to write anything down.

Torque might not be a complex application of its kind, nor does it offer too much variety, but used in the right environment can surely teach you a thing or two about torque and momentum. It takes little time to get acquainted with what it has to offer and uses incredibly low resources, making for a practical application overall.