Post date: Jul 11, 2016 3:56:50 PM
There are some great Phet simulations to play around with the simple harmonic, damped and resonant systems, namely:
Pendulums (damping optional): http://phet.colorado.edu/sims/pendulum-lab/pendulum-lab_en.html
Springs (damping optional): http://phet.colorado.edu/sims/mass-spring-lab/mass-spring-lab_en.html
Driven resonant system: http://phet.colorado.edu/sims/resonance/resonance_en.html
In Physics, in addition to a qualitative understandings, students need to get to grips with the maths and graphs. Desmos is a great tool for creating a sharing graphs (or even data tables online - it's platform agnostic) and let's student play with maths functions through sliders which increase or decrease a parameter. It's free and very fast for students and teachers to use (although embedding all three on this one webpage may cause things to go slowly)!
Below are three graphs that show
simple harmonic motion: the relationship between amplitude, frequency and derivatives
damped harmonic motion: the displacement decays un-damped, under-damped, critical or over-damped
resonance: the effect of damping on the sharpness (Q factor) of the resonance and also the resonant frequency