Best Physics Simulations for Students
10 interactive simulations mapped to the core physics curriculum — mechanics, electromagnetism, optics, waves and thermodynamics — for students who want to see the equations move.
Every simulation on this list corresponds to a topic you would actually meet in a school or first-year university physics course: projectile motion, conservation laws, fields, refraction, standing waves, the Doppler effect, heat engines. Instead of reading the formula once and moving on, you can change the inputs — mass, angle, refractive index, reservoir temperature — and watch the output respond exactly the way the theory predicts. Good for revision, for building intuition before a lecture, or for checking that a formula you memorised actually behaves the way you think it does.
-
1
🎯 Projectile Motion
Textbook kinematics made tunable — launch angle, speed, air resistance and even planetary gravity, with five trajectories overlaid so the range-angle relationship is visible at a glance.
-
2
💥 2D Collisions — Momentum and Energy
Turns the momentum- and energy-conservation laws from the mechanics syllabus into something you can break: change mass ratio and restitution and watch which quantities stay constant.
-
3
🌊 Pendulum Wave
A row of pendulums of different lengths drifts from travelling waves into chaos and back — a visual bridge between simple harmonic motion and coupled oscillators.
-
4
⚖️ Archimedes' Principle
Drop a cube, sphere or ship-hull into water, oil or mercury and watch it settle exactly where F_b = ρVg predicts, turning a formula into an obvious fact.
-
5
⚡ Electric Field Lines
Place point charges and drag them to see field lines and equipotentials update live — the standard diagram from every electrostatics chapter, but interactive.
-
6
🧲 Magnetic Field Lines
Place north and south poles and switch between field lines, particle streams and heat maps to build intuition for magnetism before tackling Maxwell's equations.
-
7
🔬 Snell's Law — Refraction & TIR
Set n₁, n₂ and the angle of incidence and watch refraction bend continuously into total internal reflection — the exact geometry behind every ray-optics exam question.
-
8
🎵 String Vibration — Standing Waves and Harmonics
Pluck a string or select harmonic modes to see nodes, antinodes and standing waves form — the physical picture behind the wave equation and Fourier series.
-
9
🔊 Doppler Effect
Watch circular wavefronts compress ahead of a moving source and stretch behind it, with a Mach cone appearing once the source passes the speed of sound.
-
10
⚙️ Carnot Cycle
Trace the four stages of an idealised heat engine on a P-V diagram and verify η = 1 − Tc/Th numerically instead of just memorising it.
Want to explore more? Browse the full library of 1000+ interactive, browser-based simulations, or see other side-by-side comparisons.