So you want to be a GlowScript developer? Here’s how!

TL;DR Developing for GlowScript requires setting up a rather extensive, but straightforwardly installed, development environment. Actual coding is done in JavaScript. GlowScript is an online programming environment inteneded to be used to teach computation in introductory physics, although it has other applications and purposes. Although GlowScript users write code in Python (Specifically VPython, which is […]

A Minimalist VPython Setup with Miniconda (Updated Monday, August 23, 2021)

I’ve updated this post to reflect one very important change to the install process under macOS 10.15 (Catalina) and one important caution. I’ve also numbered the steps for future reference. I’ve been using a full Anaconda distribution for over a year and it takes up about 4GB of disk space on my MacBook Air, which […]

Visualizing Eigenvectors with GlowScript

I owe this post entirely to my mathematics colleague Ethan Smith and his recent work on visualizing eigenvectors in a plane. This work is based in turn on the paper by Schoenfeld. I’ve taken the visualization to 3D with the help of GlowScript and Trinket. I was instantly interested in this project becuase I’m looking […]

Matter & Interactions I, Week 1

This is the first post of a series of sixteen in which I will attempt to describe the weekly goings on in my introductory calculus-based physics course. You probably already know that I use Matter & Interactions for this course, and I have since 1999. In fact, I was the first instructor in North Carolina […]