Preview - Atomic Forces And Phase Transitions

Going Further Option 1 - Single Type of Atom (More coding less chemistry)

If you have time, try some of the extensions and explorations below. You don't have to answer them in order, or answer all of them.

Questions

Please answer the questions below.

Try starting the model in HCP (this stands for hexagonally close packed) and in random configurations. When the configuration starts random, why can't you ever get all the atoms in one cluster the way they are when they all start in HCP?

In this question, you will have atoms change their color based on their energy.

First play around with changing the color of turtles. Try typing ask turtles [set color white] in the Command Center. Try whatever colors you want. You can also ask a single turtle to change its color by typing for example ask turtle 0 [set color red]. All the turtles have a number.

You can set the color to a different shade with the scale-color command. The whole command for a shade of a color is scale-color color number range1 range2. This picks a shade of color based on where number falls between range1 and range2. The closer number is to one end of the range, the lighter the output color will be and the closer it is to the other end of the range, the darker the output will be. Try using this to change the atoms colors to different shades.

When you are comfortable with that, go into the code tab and find where the turtles calculate their energy. Use the calculated energy to set their color. So each turtle should have a different color or shade of color based on its energy. This could be tricky, so feel free to ask for hints if you can't figure it out.

 

Do you notice any patterns in the energy of atoms?

Give different atoms different sizes instead of them all having the same size. 

Explain the approach you used to do this and why you did it that way.

Notes

These notes will appear on every page in this lesson so feel free to put anything here you'd like to keep track of.