I learned basics of calculus as a teenager making animations with a pirated copy of Adobe After Effects. It’s a motion graphics package where you can animate an

I learned basics of calculus as a teenager making animations with a pirated copy of Adobe After Effects. It’s a motion graphics package where you can animate any property of an element over time using both absolute values and velocity curves (i.e. the derivative). It shows both curves next to each other, so you can tweak either and see how the other changes. Seeing graphics animate according to a derivative that you just plotted yourself is really useful to develop practical intuition about what it means. After Effects is too expensive and complex for high schools, but maybe some kind of modern Logo-style environment that combines coding and animation could be useful for calculus beginners. (And linear algebra too — another field where the basics have a direct intuitive application in computer graphics.)