Development of a MATLAB-based graphical user interface to illustrate Coulomb's law and Gauss's law

Abstract

Coulomb's law and Gauss's law are two fundamental laws in electrostatics that involve electric charges and electric fields. These concepts that are not visible physically in real life can be challenging for students to understand, especially when it involves complex charge distributions. This paper presents a MATLAB-based graphical user interface (GUI) to visualise the concept of Coulomb's law and Gauss's law as well as a serious snake game to reinforce users' knowledge. This MATLAB GUI features a diverse range of 3-dimensional (3D) visualisations illustrating electric field attributes such as electric force, charge distribution and electric flux. These visualisations dynamically adapt to user-defined parameters, offering a rich and varied exploration of the electric field's characteristics without confining the scope to a specific count of models. In Coulomb's law section, the GUI plots the electric forces in 3-D for dipole, three-point charges, and unlimited charge. The Gauss's law section consists of windows for illustration of the fundamentals of Gauss's law for the electric field, and the illustration for the application of Gauss's law in finding the electric field for a point charge, infinite line charge and infinite plane charge. The serious snake game developed in this work allows students to engage in quizzes related to Coulomb's law and Gauss's law to serve as a tool for reinforcing their learning outcomes. The MATLAB-based GUI was chosen as the platform due to its excellent visualisation capabilities, ease of programming and capability to act as a powerful tool to enhance the learning of Coulomb's law and Gauss's law for students.