Simulations in undergraduate electrodynamics: Virtual laboratory experiments on the wave equation and their deployment

Experiments play a vital role in undergraduate engineering education: They allow students to learn the foundations of engineering in practical hands-on courses. However, lack of funding and increasing costs for equipment makes it harder and harder to supply a complete pool of experiments for large student classes. The EU funded “Library of Labs” project aims to counterbalance this development by creating a EU wide network of remotely controlled experiments and virtual laboratories. Remote experiments are here real experiments remotely controlled over a network, virtual laboratories simulation environments using the component metaphor of a real laboratories. In this paper, we introduce such a virtual laboratory developed at the University of Stuttgart; the aim here is to help students, here participating in the undergraduate physics course for engineers, understanding abstract phenomena by visualizing the underlying mathematics. We demonstrate this in a particular use-case, the wave equation and phenomena related to it, as they are discussed in undergraduate physics, and show how to implement this as a simulation in the virtual laboratory. In cooperation with the physics department a deployment plan for this experiment and related experiments has been created for the lecture “Physics for Engineering” which shall also be presented and discussed.