Matter & Interactions Volume I: Modern Mechanics Lecture-demonstration software   (Home) (Articles) (Contents) (Instructors)

Free Software

The work below is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License. Please read the license before downloading the software.

3D Software

Lecture-demonstration programs for mechanics have been written by Ruth Chabay and Bruce Sherwood using VPython, based on the Python programming language. There are some additional mechanics programs included in the demo suite distributed with VPython. Our students are now doing real-time 3D graphics programming with VPython.

3D Ball and Spring Model of a Solid, a QuickTime movie by R. Chabay:

• Large version (640x480; 27 MB zip file)
• Small version (320x240; 7 MB zip file)

2D Software

Old 2D lecture-demonstration programs by B. Sherwood:

• Orbits: 2- and 3-body gravitational motion
• Speed of Sound: propagation of sound in a ball-and-spring model of a solid
• Hill: observe kinetic and potential energy for a ball moving on a hill
• Resonance: transient and steady-state response of a driven oscillator
• Scattering: angular distribution for Coulomb scattering

  Download 2D software for Windows
  Download 2D software for Macintosh System 9 (requires Stuffit Expander)