Scientific Animation with Python

Dr. Phil Nelson, University of Pennsylvania, is leading this workshop on making engaging animations with Python, the coding language.

It’s said that a picture is worth a thousand words, but an animation can be better still, because it represents time as time, not as distance along some axis. Suddenly the process you wish to show becomes a story with a plot. We have all resorted to grabbing an animation from Wikipedia, but the best ones are those that you make for yourself. I’ll help you teach yourself how (and why) to animate various kinds of charts, heatmaps, and so on, and how to save them in forms that can be embedded into your future presentations.

You’ll need to arrive with a laptop running Python, preferably the free distribution available from Anaconda.com . Equally good, Google Colaboratory can also do what we want.

For an excellent resource on getting started with using Python for modeling, please see Dr. Nelson’s entry-level textbook, available as an e-book here. There are also highly-rated courses on LinkedIn Learning, available to members of the university community.

Please register here.