Introduction

Formulation of physical problems makes heavy use of principal sketches such as the one in Figure 1. This particular sketch illustrates the classical mechanics problem of a rolling wheel on an inclined plane. The figure is made up many individual elements: a rectangle filled with a pattern (the inclined plane), a hollow circle with color (the wheel), arrows with labels (the N and Mg forces, and the x axis), an angle with symbol θ, and a dashed line indicating the starting location of the wheel.

Drawing software and plotting programs can produce such figures quite easily in principle, but the amount of details the user needs to control with the mouse can be substantial. Software more tailored to producing sketches of this type would work with more convenient abstractions, such as circle, wall, angle, force arrow, axis, and so forth. And as soon we start programming to construct the figure we get a range of other powerful tools at disposal. For example, we can easily translate and rotate parts of the figure and make an animation that illustrates the physics of the problem. Programming as a superior alternative to interactive drawing is the mantra of this section.

A wheel on an inclined plane.