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  Session: Technologies
  Paper Type: Poster
  Title: Progress in Easy-to-Use 3D Programming Environments
  Meeting: 2013 Summer Meeting: Portland, Oregon
  Location: N/A
  Date:
  Time: 9:15AM
  Author: Bruce A. Sherwood, North Carolina State University
5056038121, Bruce_Sherwood@ncsu.edu
  Co-Author(s): Steve Spicklemire
  Abstract: VPython (vpython.org), a free open-source module for the popular Python programming language, lets even novice programmers write programs that model physical systems and generate navigable real-time 3D animations. VPython plays an important role in several recent computational physics textbooks. At matterandinteractions.org are many lecture demo programs written in VPython. There are about 50,000 downloads of VPython per year, including by thousands of students in intro physics courses. In January 2013 VPython 6 was released, based on the cross-platform GUI library wxPython, which has made it possible for VPython animations to share a window with standard widgets (buttons, sliders, scrolling text boxes, etc.). VPython is quite mature; GlowScript (glowscript.org) is a related but very new environment under development that executes programs written in JavaScript or CoffeeScript in a browser. There are converters that facilitate translation from VPython to GlowScript. VPython and GlowScript will be demonstrated at the poster session.
  Footnotes: None
  Presentation: VPython_and_GlowScript.pdf

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