Computational physics with Python: tool setup

Imagine you want to learn computational physics and Python as an advanced high-school student or undergraduate. Where to start? Assuming no prior programming experience, a quick introduction to programming concepts won’t go amiss. To get to that point, though, you’ll need to prepare some tools first. In this post, I describe how to install Python and Visual Studio Code, two tools we need before we can start programming and learning computational physics. I then describe how to configure VS Code to use Python, finishing up by writing a toy Python program and running it within VS Code. Setting up the tools for computational physics. Image credits: VS Code logo, Python logo A high school student that I tutor asked me a while ago if one can learn physics by programming in Python. I answered: “Of course!” Since then, I’ve had all kinds of ideas about how to introduce computational physics and numerical methods to advanced high-school or early-level university students. This is the first…