Interactive animations as a tool in teaching general relativity to upper secondary school students

Abstract

One possible and often seen approach to teaching General Relativity are the so-called embedding diagrams. Educators are using them, sometimes perhaps even unknowingly, any time they talk about spacetime around a star being “like a rubber sheet weighed down by a bowling ball”. In this contribution we will briefly remind what these embedding diagrams are and discuss possible problems with their use. Finally, we will introduce interactive computer animations (applets) as a possible approach to overcome some of these problems.