Physics Courseware Support: Mechanics

Hi
The attached worksheet is the final version that appears in Maple 2023 as Courseware support for Mechanics in the context of Physics courses. Everything below also works in Maple 2022.2 with the last Maplesoft Physics Updates for that release..

What follows is presented as "Topic > Problem > Solution", with typical symbolic problems and how you can solve them on a worksheet. As such, this material does not intend to compete with textbooks nor with teacher's notes but to be a helpful complement, as in "what can computer algebra really do to support the learning activity". Mainly, allow for focusing the logic and thinking while the computer takes care of the intricacies of the algebraic manipulations, that when computing with paper and pencil so frequently take mostly all of our focus.

The material, thus, has 70 solved problems covering all the sort-of-syllabus of hyperlinks below. The presentation uses notation as in textbooks and illustrates different techniques, several not present in help pages. It also shows why it is relevant to have a Vectors package that handles abstract vectors as well as projections using unit vectors, not matrix representations for them. Your feedback about everything you see in the worksheet - suggestions for new topics or problems, or anything else - can be useful and is welcome.

Due to the length of this material (~100 pages), out of the 70 problems, below I left open (visible) the Solution sections of only a few of them, illustrating different things, also new functionality e.g. the first and last ones. That is sufficient to have an idea of what this is about. At the end there is a Maple worksheet with the same contents and a PDF file of the same with all the sections open.



With the best wishes for 2023.