I'm a high school physics teacher, and I'd like to try some Python programming in my class next year. Be advised, I teach the math-lite version of our physics class.

I'm thinking that some basic programming would be an interesting way to introduce some of the mathematical reasoning and methods that they'll need.

I'm developing "Visual," a 3D graphics library for Python that will be used next year for student programming in the "Matter and Interactions" introductory physics course at Carnegie Mellon University (see http://cil.andrew.cmu.edu/mi.html). Matter and Interactions is a college course that is more advanced than your "math-lite" high school course, but Visual is designed to be as easy to use as possible. Here's a Python program for a 3D animation of a bouncing ball. Notice the lack of explicit graphics code, apart from the creation of the "floor" and "ball" objects: ---------------------------- from visual import * floor = box(length=5, height=0.5, width=5, color=color.purple) ball = sphere(pos=(0,4,0), color=color.red) ball.velocity = vector(0,-1,0) dt = 0.01 while 1: rate(100) ball.pos = ball.pos + ball.velocity*dt if ball.y < 1: ball.velocity.y = -ball.velocity.y else: ball.velocity.y = ball.velocity.y - 9.8*dt ---------------------------- Notice that ball.pos and ball.velocity are vectors; Visual's vector type takes care of the details of vector arithmetic. rate() is a helpful function that limits the number of simulation steps per second, so that the animation runs at the same speed on all machines. A public alpha release of Visual, complete with physics-oriented example programs, will be available within a few days. Since we need to provide students with a single installer, Visual will come packaged with its own Python 1.5.2 installation and a version of IDLE modified to suit our needs. A bare module will also eventually be available. Visual currently runs on Windows and Linux, and we are planning a (hopefully "well-supported," Kirby :) Macintosh version as well. I'll post a link when I have one. Dave