Ethics of the mention of Nazi weaponry for a computational physics task A colleague of mine and me are organizing a 3-day preparation course for undergrad students to prepare them for their upcoming lecture about computational physics (the course in about 1.5 months).
This course takes place at a German university.

The third day of this course will involve a "do-it-yourself-day" where the students can choose between different projects to do.
We are in the process of creating these projects.
Usually, we are creating them independently of each other and uploading them to our course-site and inform each other we added a new project. Sometimes we'll also talk about them to discuss specific tasks etc. 

So I made a project to calculate the trajectory of an artillery from the WWII.
It's perfect for an academic task because it has a high velocity and goes high into the atmosphere so the students must do the calculation with air friction and height effects like decreasing temperature and pressure.
I almost completed this project to be ready to be uploaded but my colleague has moral concerns since its a weapon and was used by the Nazis.

I don't have that many concerns since its a purely academic approach to this and it's not like we are calculating how much damage it can do. Also, the approaches used to solve this task are not so unlike the approach to get a space shuttle again safe to Earth (which is much more complicated though since I didn't choose it) for example.

Q: Are his concerns justified and should I abandon this project?

(I'd also be glad to new proposals, it should be fast and go high to use friction and height effect.)
German citizen here. My feeling is that your example is not at all outrageous or morally problematic per se; but it might lead to some raised eyebrows in the given setting (a German university) and for quite understandable reasons.

You use a German WW II weapon simply to illustrate some computational problem. That is, you don't make any evaluative statement about nazism, German WW II aggression or even warfare and weapons in general. Neither is your problem about making weapons more effective, which could then be seen as an implicit value judgement.

It is also, fortunately, no longer "taboo" to discuss the nazi past. German political culture has overcome the lead-heavy immediate post-war period, in which the memory of the atrocities that Germans had committed was actively repressed together with everything that reminded of them. To be sure, there is a (perhaps large) minority that prefers to rationalize, relativize or even idealize the nazi regime and its crimes. Some of these guys have a strange fascination for WW II memorabilia and nazi paraphernalia. Here it can be hard to draw the line between hobby historians and hobby revisionists.

So as your student I would wonder: Of all the examples that you could have chosen, why this particular one? If the course was about military history or WW II, the choice of example would make immediate sense. But since it isn't, your example seems quite arbitrary. (Wouldn't other projectiles or objects have similar physical properties?) This would probably lead me to conclude that the example is "just and example", but I couldn't quite help to speculate a bit about your motivation and perhaps your historical-political attitude. Less so, however, if you are not a German.