As an aid to teaching about diffusion, the Random Walk program was created to illustrate the outcome of many random walks by either one or many atoms. The random walk program is a stand alone application written in Macromedia Director.

The software provides two modes of operation. First, it can be used to animate a random walk by one atom on a two dimensional plane, providing output similar to that shown to the right.

Alternatively, it can be used to generate a histogram for a large number of atoms after each atom has randomly jumped to the left or right a given number of times. A screenshot of this part of the program is shown to the left.

One way this program can be used is to ask students to collect data for the root-mean-square (RMS) distance traveled for different numbers of total jumps, and then ask them to use Microsoft Excel (or similar program) to fit an equation to their data. They discover on their own that the RMS distance traveled is proportional to the square root of the number of jumps. This software has already been successfully been used at Penn State.