[Edu-sig] school physics/math courses

[roberto]

On Sun, Oct 19, 2008 at 11:16 PM, Gregor Lingl <gregor.lingl at aon.at> wrote:
>
>
> 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.
thank you, i'll look carefully at them
>
> 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.
>
great, since i am intended to HS students, programs should deal with
HS physics taking into account the background and the students'
learning styles

> 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?
definitively, i think we should gather together at list a
comprehensive list of efforts on the topic;
something similar is the page in
http://www.python.org/community/sigs/current/edu-sig/

but, probably,  you think about a simple repository of contributed scripts



-- 
roberto
OS: GNU/Linux, Debian