From Numerical Modeling to Didactic Simulation in Electromagnetism

Supported by new technologies in education, didactic simulation has become an important research issue. It constitutes a genuine educational innovation for all training platforms. In particular, in electromagnetism and electronics, real didactic progress should be concretized by the interactive simulation of certain experiences that are often inaccessible in reality by the animated visualization of different abstract concepts. However, their design is constrained by technological choices, learning theories and numerical models which will ensure both minimal execution time, better stability and acceptable accuracy. Based on a topological approach to electromagnetism, a key to a successful numerical object-oriented method, we present a new "Element Oriented Model" (EOM). This method allows to generalize the FDTD method and the non-standard NS-FDTD method and to develop two new and faster algorithms. It is thus proposed as a foundation to carry out interactive simulations that can be described as "simulated experiments" via object-oriented numerical methods.