Partnership for Integration of Computation into Undergraduate Physics

Introduces students to creating position, velocity, and acceleration graphs. After creating graphs, students have to use these plots to interpret and predict whether the trajectories of two objects will intersect. The example given is a student sprinting at a constant speed to catch up with a food truck undergoing constant acceleration, but could easily be rewritten to accommodate a different example. In a stretch goals section, students make graphs of 2D motion and/or create piecewise plots of objects that do not have constant acceleration. Format is a Jupyter notebook with code blocks the students can fill in. This is useful for students who may have minimal programming background, so they will not be required to write code totally from scratch. The exercises are also very short to meet the needs of this population of students. However, this could also easily be adapted to different languages, or with less scaffolding for more advanced students. I have included both the version for students (as a code template) and the solution (as completed code).