AnimationsInFluidMath

Animations make math come to life in FluidMath. In FluidMath, you can make your hand-drawn math sketches come to life with FluidMath’s Animation functionality. To do this, first turn on the animation functionality by clicking the “Animate” menuitem. A slider is displayed on the page with player controls to the right of the slider. Next, we draw the objects we want to animate. Turn on the Drawing mode by clicking the Draw Menuitem. We draw two cars and a road. The cars and the road should each be drawn so that there is space between them. Next, we need to label the cars and give length to the road. Turn on the Math Writing mode by clicking the Math Write menuitem. Then, we label the cars A and B and we give length to the road. Also, please note that the road and the label on the road give scale to the page so the Animation system knows how far to move the cars when they animate. Next, we write two math expressions to describe the motion of the cars. The first car has a constant velocity of 80 units of distance per unit time and we use a quadratic to describe the motion of the second car. It is important to label the cars with the same variables used in the math expressions. You can see that the math expressions and the labels are highlighted respectively with the same color. It is also important to make sure that a subscript X is used to describe the horizontal motion. A subscript of Y would be used to describe vertical motion. When we click the play button next to the animation slider, the cars move in an animated simulation as described by the math on the page. Tap the background of the FluidMath page to reset the animation. As you can see, animations in FluidMath are an engaging way to connect abstract mathematical concepts with the real world in your classroom.