Very Basic Getting Started

This is for those that have never done anything with a Colab (python/Jupyter) Notebook

Go to your google drive and click the New button, then navigate in the menu until you find the Google Colaboratory option. Click that.

The notebook you just made will be called untitled and will contain one Cell. The Cell is where you write your code. You can click the little arrow to execute (i.e. run) the cell.

Just to make sure it's all working, you can type print('a message'), then run the cell, and you should see the message appear below.

Of course we can do a lot more than just write messages. Math is easy to play with:

At this point, you should work through some of the examples here: Basic Python Intro

For this class, you will need to be able to work with data. This usually involves reading data files. You can do that in several ways with Colab. One would be to just upload your file to the 'session'. Click the little folder:

And then you can upload a data file to play with. For example, I made a csv file with times and distances for an object in free fall.

Select the option to 'copy path' and then you can use that file in your code.

Here's a quick way to plot that data file:

That should be enough to get you started.