AtomTouch is a molecular simulation app, created through a partnership between UW MRSEC and MLI, that allows learners to explore principles of thermodynamics and molecular dynamics in an tactile, exploratory way.

The Need
Stick and ball models of chemistry leave much to be desired. They easily reinforce misconceptions and they don’t provide learners with a sense of the dynamic movement and forces that are operating at the molecular scale.

Project Description
Working with molecular dynamics simulation expert Dane Morgan, UW MRSEC education director Ann Lynn Gillian-Daniel and with the support of a MRSEC seed grant, Field Day Lab developed an interactive 3-D simulation for mobile devices. The simulation was developed to help students understand the structures and attributes of particles at the molecular level, providing real-time feedback and responding to student’s actions.

Simulation Features
-Lennard Jones and Buckingham Simulation Engine
-Create molecules from Cu, Au, Pt, Na and Cl
-Change thermodynamics properties
-Control time
-Experiment with the potential energy, finding stable geometries
-Watch the process of melting and vaporizing

The Team
Anne Lynn Gillian-Daniel (Education Lead)
Dane Morgan (Simulation Lead)
David Gagnon (Production Lead)
Yucheng Tu (Software Engineer)
Amirhossein Davoody (Lead Simulation Software Engineer)
Justin Moeller (Software Engineer)
Eric Peterson (Modeling, Animation, UX Design)
Ben Taylor (User Testing, Educational Design)
Izabela Szlufarska (MRSEC Inderdisciplinary Computational Group Lead)
Tyler Anlauf (Modeling, Graphic Design, UX Design)
Tam Mayeshiba (Simulation Software Engineer)
Henry Wu (Simulation Software Engineer)
Kritika Rai (Software Engineer)
Anup Rathi (Software Engineer)

Source Code
This is a MIT Licensed, Opensource project. We would love to have some help in developing new potentials. Contribute to the code at https://github.com/UWMLI/atomtouch.git

Funding
This research was primarily supported by NSF through the University of Wisconsin Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (DMR-1121288)

Funding was also provided by NSF Software Infrastructure for Sustained Innovation (grant 1148011)