Show HN: Interactive physics simulations I built while teaching my daughter

I started teaching my daughter physics by showing her how things actually work - plucking guitar strings to explain vibration, mixing paints to understand light, dropping objects to see gravity in action.

She learned so much faster through hands-on exploration than through books or videos. That's when I realized: what if I could recreate these physical experiments as interactive simulations?

Lumen is the result - an interactive physics playground covering sound, light, motion, life, and mechanics. Each module lets you manipulate variables in real-time and see/hear the results immediately.

Try it: https://www.projectlumen.app/

Extra points if its homepage can offer informative 80-character descriptions. (What is the term for this (suggested) web design?)

Not sure if it's just Firefox, but a lot of things seem to be rendering incorrectly and very slowly for me. The text for the descriptions is very small compared to the rest of the text which makes it kind of hard to read. Also, on the Spectrum demo, the prism is displayed up and to the left of the light rays. After a few minutes the pages just grind to a halt so I can't really explore the rest.

Kudos! I love seeing things people have built for their kids.

This reminds me a bit of this site, which has been around for a long time and has a similar motivation: teach physics concepts using simulations:

https://phet.colorado.edu/en/simulations/filter?subjects=phy...

Not the same level - but teaching my kid to use keyboard, and i vibecoded this: https://ai.studio/apps/drive/1MErVnhhK89peNh1RPa3y-ufFExG5Bn...

This is cool!

I'm curious whether you're using this to teach initial familiarity, or as the first step toward touch typing?

For touch typing, I think Typing Club is a good place to start for kids. And then Keybr to develop full fluency. And then Monkeytype to develop speed.

EDIT - when I wrote this comment I had only opened the link on my phone. Now I see it on desktop it's clear that the on-screen keyboard is intended to teach key positions without the user looking down at their keyboard. It's good.

This is pretty nice! I was quite impressed with the colour mixing one in particular

(At the same time I was reminded a bit by the subtext of the web series Don't Hug Me I'm Scared, especially when pumping the heart to deliver body's needed cargo, like aspic and white sauce -- but that's just my brainrot showing)

I can imagine this being pretty fun on a tablet

Fun! Any plan to open source it?

wholesome :)

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