Motion toys for eye and mind
Judah L. Schwartz · Communications of the ACM · 1996
a l w o r l dThe Newtonian Sandbox is an "intellectual mirror" software environment likely to be of interest and use to physics students 12 to 18 years of age and to their teachers as well as in university classes.It provides users with an opportunity to prepare a wide range of models that generate motions of point masses in one and two dimensions.It also allows students to study the detail and the nuance of such motions through the use of trajectories in space, plots of horizontal and vertical positions, radial and angular positions, and phase planes corresponding to each of the Cartesian and each of the polar coordinates.Vector directions and magnitudes can be displayed, and tabulations of data are possible.