Cart + Friction Pad Newton's 2nd Law Simulation

A no-dependency browser simulation for a Half Atwood-style lab:

• Part 1: cart only
• Part 2: cart + friction pad

Students can run trials, manually select graph windows, compute mean force and acceleration slope, add accepted trials to a table, build force-vs-acceleration fits, and export CSV/PNG artifacts.

Local run

python3 -m http.server 8000

Open http://localhost:8000.

Tests

npm test

File structure

• index.html - UI shell
• styles.css - layout + styling
• src/app.js - orchestration and event wiring
• src/physics.js - physics equations and motion threshold logic
• src/signals.js - synthetic time-series generation
• src/regression.js - averaging and linear regression utilities
• src/graphs.js - canvas plotting + manual window selection
• src/export.js - CSV and PNG exports
• src/presets.js - teacher presets and scenario metadata
• src/state.js - application state store
• tests/*.test.js - Node built-in test runner coverage

GitHub Pages

This is a static app with no build step. Deploy the repo root from the main branch in GitHub Pages settings.