Winplot - My Favourite Graphing Software! It is FREE!

In the teaching of physics, it is often that we need to do plots of equations. Many A-level teachers tend to use Excel. This is great when I am creating questions which requires students to take points off graph grids, however, not so great when I just want general (but accurate) shapes to different graphs.

My search of a software became imperative when I was lecturing waves and wanted to generate many different sinusoidal graph starting at different phases. After plotting a few graphs on excel, I gave up and decided to ask a (Further) Math teacher, who told me that she used a free software Winplot.

I have since been using Winplot to generate all my graphs. I found it relatively easy to use for generation of graphs - just type in the equation and the software auto generates for you. You get the flexibilty to change the scale set the thickness and it can be easily copied to the clipboard which can be pasted in any Word document.

It has been almost 7 years since I found Winplot and am still using it. The author constantly makes improvements to it and it is now one of the most powerful graphing software and the great thing is it is still FREE! It is also relatively easy to pick up and there are many external "instructors" that have produced tutorials, manuals, and video instructions.

If you are looking for a free graphing software, this is definitely one to try out.

Most updated version can be found at : http://math.exeter.edu/rparris/winplot.html

A good startoff point for learning are a set of instructional video by Steve Simonds which can be found here : http://spot.pcc.edu/~ssimonds/winplot/

Other supplementary materials can also be accessed here: http://math.exeter.edu/rparris/wpsupp.html

There are some youtube videos as well, one of which is given below.  If you like them, you can google for more at youtube.