Animation

Coding in Maple does not require expert programmimg skills, so writing a Maple program deals with putting a proc ( ) and an end around a sequence of commands. And it is pretty easy to put prewitten routines together from Maples powerful bulding blocks and plotting facilities. The plottools package provides many useful commands for producing plotting objects, which can be scaled, translated and rotated. The following Maple codes will be used in the coming sections. The first prosedure animate a spring-mass system with and without a dashpot, and the second animate the response to a rectangular pulse by a linear differential second order equation.

Because it is impossible to show animation on paper, the animation figures shows 4 consecutive frames. The animations in this paper can be seen live on the Journal's Web site.

Maple code for a mass-spring system

Maple code for a rectangular pulse