Sample spreadsheets

• Monkey and hunter. This animates the monkey and hunter. Several things are wrong at the beginning, which the students will have to identify and fix.
• Helmholtz coils. This illustrates the use of scroll bars to give immediate feedback when a parameter is changed. The user drags a fine or coarse control and moves one of the two coils until the magnetic field between the coils is quite uniform halfway between them.
• Travelling waves. This animates waves travelling to the right and to the left, and shows the sum of these to be a 'standing' wave. (This graph is somewhat busy.)

Animating a graph

• The general idea is to create a column for x and one for of f(x,t), and have the value of t be automatically updated when you press F9. If the value of the time is to be kept in cell B3, and the increment in the time is entered in cell B2, one would put in cell B3:    =B3+B2 . This circular reference will do the updating, once you convince Excel that this is what you really want to do.
• Travelling waves and standing waves
• A travelling pulse

• Under View and Toolbars, select Control Toolbox.
• The blue architect's triangle in the Control Toolbox toggles between Design Mode and regular Run Mode. In design mode you can place different controls the spreadsheet, and adjust their parameters. In Run Mode the spreadsheet runs, and you cannot change any features of the controls
• Select a scroll bar by clicking once on it.