The Cartoon Guide to Physics

Publisher: HarperCollins
Type: Games
Category: Educational
Language:
Shared by: MR
On: 2015-11-14 20:51:11
Updated by: InkBlot
On: 2023-06-15 21:42:37
Other contributors: RT
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What is The Cartoon Guide to Physics?

Larry Gonick's Cartoon Guides are a smashing success in traditional publishing —the physics and the statistics guides are perennial best-sellers in their subject areas. HarperCollins Interactive has performed the admirable feat of making a CD-ROM that's as good as Gonick’s books.

The Cartoon Guide to Physics (CGP) covers the first semester's worth of material in a high-school or introductory college physics course: velocity acceleration, gravity, and angular momentum. It doesn't include electricity and magnetism, or thermal physics. The program is designed to accompany regular course work; however, someone with intellectual curiosity and a minimal background in algebra could probably follow most of the material.

There are two action sections of the CGP screen (Lucy's World and The Workshop) and two reference sections (Hall of Fame and Glossary). In Lucy's World, an astronaut character lectures and acts out concepts such as constant gravitational acceleration and orbital motion. The Workshop lets you perform on-screen experiments — carefully keyed to the Lucy's World tutorial — on potential versus kinetic energy, conservation of momentum, acceleration, and gravity...

There are plenty of educational CD-ROMs on the market in which sound and animation are merely a distracting sideshow. CGP is different; its multimedia features — which are based on the art in the original book — make serious and complex points, just as Larry Gonich's cartoons perform genuine educational functions in the printed Cartoon Gunk series.

CGP has a few quirks. At several points Lucy prattles on about equations while the screen display remains static. Hall of Fame contains short descriptions of twentieth-century physicists, although the physics lessons stop with Newton’s first discoveries in the seventeenth century. The Mac version has Windows-style close boxes, and sometimes it's tricky to restart an animation after you’ve ducked out for a peak at the Glossary section.

On a more serious note, the program requires 8MB of RAM. If ever there was a program designed to make education happen on millions of Performas, CGP is it; unfortunately, most Performa owners will have to pop for a RAM upgrade first.

The Last Word Cartoon Guide to Physics is a real value. It teaches a good intro ductory mechanics course, and it's interesting to users who just want to understand how the universe works.

Seiter, Charles. (April 1996). The Cartoon Guide to Physics. Macworld. (pg. 78).


Download The Cartoon Guide to Physics for Mac

(20.15 MiB / 21.13 MB)
21 / 2020-10-05 / 9b1cb997da59071def6823fbcd7c97ebf850d3e1 / /


Architecture


68K + PPC (FAT)




Compatibility notes

The publisher still has this game available for sale from Amazon


Emulating this? It could probably run under: Basilisk II





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