User suggestion: allow circuits without wires

[arouinfar]

A user Tweeted that they couldn't complete a circuit without wires. @ariel-phet and I both confirmed that this seems to be the case. Is there a rule that requires at least one wire to close the circuit? If so, can you remember the reason @samreid?

I am not proposing a change, but would like to confirm that the behavior is intentional.

[ariel-phet]

Tweet for reference:

https://twitter.com/brianwfrank/status/1511009238419750915?s=20&t=gHYlPz0kG6IfbyyBV36ydw

[samreid]

Historically, we required at least one wire, so we could guarantee there was at least that much resistance. This is probably less of a concern now that batteries have internal resistance. There is also an implementation constraint that only the dragged vertex is adjusted when dragging, so with fixed-length circuit elements, the other vertices are not auto-adjusted to get a perfect match. But I suppose one day we could rewrite that to allow adjusting the other angles to get everything to line up.

[arouinfar]

Thanks @samreid. I'll leave it to @ariel-phet to communicate with the user. Based on the conversation, we can consider updating the behavior in the next release.

[ariel-phet]

User writes:

Students need to know that wires are just conductors, not some special magic. I have wanted to do activities where students connect circuits with only things like paper clip, coin, light bulb, battery, and found out you couldn’t.

You could add a wire that looks like a piece of aluminum foil, and not change the model, sort of like the resistors that look like other objects, etc?

[arouinfar]

Thanks @ariel-phet. I'll add this to the next publication milestone for consideration.

[arouinfar]

@samreid @matthew-blackman and I agree that this is not within the scope of the current milestone.