Lab manual available

[Daniel Schroeder]

This past semester I taught a sophomore-level course on computational physics, mostly using the GlowScript environment. It was a lab-based course consisting of seven projects:

Making Shapes (intro to GlowScript)

Projectile Motion (1D and 2D, with and without air resistance)

Pendulum (including damped and driven, with an intro to chaos)

Orbits (Kepler's laws, three-body simulations)

Molecular Dynamics (Lennard-Jones system in 2D)

Random Processes (intro to Monte Carlo and a traditional Python environment)

Final Project (students designed their own projects)

The prerequisites are a semester of calculus and a semester of calculus-based introductory physics. No prior programming experience is assumed. This course is required for our physics majors and has become a popular elective for computer science majors.

For the benefit of anyone who would like to teach a similar course or just try out some of the projects, I have just posted a complete pdf version of our 85-page lab manual at http://physics.weber.edu/schroeder/scicomp/. I have also posted the LaTeX source of the lab manual, in case anyone would like to adapt it. Finally, on the same page you'll find a link to a VPython Quick Reference sheet that I put together for the students.

Dan Schroeder

Weber State University

[Bruce Sherwood]

Thanks much for sharing this, Dan.

Bruce