[Edu-sig] seasonal challenge to calculator dominance in high schools

[Wes Turner]

On Sunday, June 23, 2019, C. Cossé <ccosse at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Sun, Jun 23, 2019 at 11:36 AM Wes Turner <wes.turner at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>
>> In one lesson developing a simple solar system in pygame, for example,
>> you can teach everything from the meaning of pi, periodic motion, dynamic
>> graphics, orders of magnitude, scaling, OOP,  ... all kinds of stuff.
>>
>> What a fun problem! Does PyGame have 2D physics? Kerbal Space Program
>> looks fun, too
>>
>
> It might by now ... but that's another big lesson: don't use somebody
> else's physics libs ... do that yourself too!  For the above problem there
> is nothing more than F=ma (W=mg ... Weight=mass x accel_due2_grav) ... the
> rest is circle stuff.
>
>
>>
>>
>>> AND basically lay the ground-work for developing their own 2D plotting
>>> software.
>>>
>>
>> What grade levels or math and physics knowledge would you think
>> appropriate for these tasks?
>>
>
> No prior knowledge ... it's all on the teacher to be familiar enough to
> walk all over and essentially "drag them through" (the kids=them) the
> process of developing their own quick solar system model.  It would be a
> good team-teaching lesson, one teacher on the white-board lecturing, and
> the other typing the python-translation of the lecture into code on a big
> screen.
>

Do you start with 2D observational data; as a model development exercise?
Is that freely available online somewhere?

For the 3D cube projected into 2D space rotation problem:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_transformation

> In each reference frame, an observer can use a local coordinate system
(most exclusively Cartesian coordinates in this context) to measure
lengths, and a clock to measure time intervals. An observer is a real or
imaginary entity that can take measurements, say humans, or any other
living organism—or even robots and computers. An event is something that
happens at a point in space at an instant of time, or more formally a point
in spacetime. The transformations connect the space and time coordinates of
an event as measured by an observer in each frame.[nb 1]
>
> They supersede the Galilean transformation of Newtonian physics, which
assumes an absolute space and time (see Galilean relativity). The Galilean
transformation is a good approximation only at relative speeds much smaller
than the speed of light. Lorentz transformations have a number of
unintuitive features that do not appear in Galilean transformations. For
example, they reflect the fact that observers moving at different
velocities may measure different distances, elapsed times, and even
different orderings of events, but always such that the speed of light is
the same in all inertial reference frames. The invariance of light speed is
one of the postulates of special relativity.


>
>
>
>>
>> - Specify the coordinates of the vertices of a cube
>> - Draw the cube in 3D (2D from a perspective)
>> - Rotate the cube or move the 'camera/observer's (around a point other
>> than the origin) in 3D space and draw each frame at time t
>>
>>
>>>
>>> -Charlie
>>>
>>> On Sun, Jun 23, 2019 at 11:09 AM kirby urner <kirby.urner at gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>> Somewhere every summer, I tend to call into question the wisdom of
>>>> buying the kids another scientific calculator at the drug store (we call
>>>> them that here, pharmacies have calculators hanging on racks at the
>>>> checkout, to cash in on gullibility and impulse buys).
>>>>
>>>> This year:
>>>> https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/4dsolutions/School_of_
>>>> Tomorrow/blob/master/Sandbox_Example.ipynb
>>>>
>>>> That's of course the read-only version (vs. mybinder.org) with the
>>>> benefit of a free video at the bottom, not visible on Github, where I give
>>>> my viewers the elevator speech i.e. pitch Jupyter Notebooks using Python as
>>>> superior to slaving away with a graphing calculator.
>>>>
>>>> Not that anyone is still using graphing calculators right?  Sorry if
>>>> I'm beating a dead horse (idiom).
>>>>
>>>> Kirby
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> Edu-sig mailing list
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>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>>
>>> ccosse.github.io
>>>
>>
>
> --
>
> ccosse.github.io
>
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