[Edu-sig] school physics/math courses

[Gregor Lingl]

roberto schrieb:
> hello
> (i am rather new in python ...)
>
> i am about to start a course of physics and math for students aged
> 14-17 (high school)
> and i am deeply interested in the possibilty of teaching fundamental
> concepts of these subjects via teaching programming;
> i chose python (i won't change my mind ...)
>
> so i am looking for resources on how to deal with these topics via
> this great programming language;
>
>   
Hi Roberto,

I've done a few short scripts which might be interesting to you. Take
them as examples, which you may use, modify or simply take for
inspiration to do something similar.

The first one, together with an example - tdemo_planet_and_moon.py -
which you might find here:

http://svn.python.org/view/python/trunk/Demo/turtle/

are simulations of gravitational three-body-systems.

tdemo_sierpinsky.py is a script which draws a colorful sierpinsky-triangle
and uses a simple 3D-Vector class. (BTW the gravitation-scripts above use
a 2DVector class which is included in the turtle module.)

tdemo_spaceship.py is sort of a game which I've used in my physics classes
to let my students experience how to drive a spaceship in agravic space. 
(Try
to drive it along a circlular orbit!) Before this, my students in a 
computer science
class had programmed it, so it's code might be worth to be polished a 
bit ;-)

Another mathematically interesting example is the script tdemo_chaos.py 
which
you can also find at the link mentioned above. It shows that the result 
of some
80 iterations of an algebraic expression depends extremely on the way it is
realized in python (that means of the order of arithmetic operations).

All those examples use the turtle module which is part of the Python 
standard
library since Python 2.6. This module is devised to provide very easy
access to graphics which might be of importance if you do mathematics and
physics, because it allows to avoid some 'bureaucratic' overhead which is
necessary to use Toolkits like Tkinter and others. Thus you can concentrate
more easily on the mathematical and physical contents of you curriculum.

Maybe it might be useful to create some sort of repository in the web
for small classroom dedicated math- and physics related Python scripts?

Regards,
Gregor






> i need some help from you and moreover if you are aware of books
> already covering these need
>
> thank you in advance
>   
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