Modeling a Changing World written by mathematics professor Tim Chartier and his student Nick Dovidio presents curricular material in an OSP Launcher package to motivate the need for numerically solving ordinary differential equations. The package discusses such applications as a mass-spring system and its connection to computer simulation for movies.  An interactive model that simulates a two-body gravitational model of the moon and earth allows for exploring the topic of numerical error. Other models explore topics that include slope fields, numerical integration and numerical solvers for ordinary differential equations.

Please note that this resource requires at least version 1.5 of Java (JRE).