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This Maple worksheet is set up as a black box. Yes, the code is visible — and students have been known to modify it during class. But the current implementation is intended to allow students to draw various trajectories quickly, without worrying too much about about the computational details.

This strategy has a price: students are often confused as to what the various parameters are, although simply telling them what each one does is usually all they're looking for.

Previous versions of this activity started by deriving the differential equations governing motion in a rotating frame from the much simpler equations of motion in an inertial frame, then using Maple to solve those equations, then plotting the result for various parameter values. This would seem to be a more consistent approach, but does require spending considerable class time on these mathematical details.

Other alternatives would be to make a written derivation available, although it doesn't seem likely that many students would work through it themselves. Another would be to guide students through this derivation as a homework problem. The original implementation was somewhere in between, providing a Maple worksheet which does the derivation and asking students to work through it, either in or out of class.