Investigation of Chaos - Without Programming Skill

Studying chaotic systems at all levels of physics education can highly motivate students to learn physics. In this paper two simple systems, the Duffing oscillator and a compass needle motion, are presented which were used in a high school and in a university setting for teaching the basic ideas of chaotic motion. Studying both systems can begin with their simple mechanical models which connect, the mathematical description to tangible reality for the students. To surmount the mathematical difficulties of the theoretical treatment of the models, freeware software, the Dynamics Solver (DS), were applied. It will be shown how DS can facilitate students’ first steps toward chaotic systems both at college and at high school level. Downloadable materials in ZIP format, related to this paper, can be found in our web page [1].The accepted manuscript in pdf format is listed with the files at the bottom of this page. The presentation of the authors' names and (or) special characters in the title of the manuscript may differ slightly between what is listed on this page and what is listed in the pdf file of the accepted manuscript; that in the pdf file of the accepted manuscript is what was submitted by the author