A New Approach to Authoring Interactive Curricular Material
Presented at
Multimedia in Physics Teaching and Learning
AMSTEL Institute, Amsterdam
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Wolfgang Christian |
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Contributors: Mario Belloni, Aaron Titus, Jim Nolen
| A persistent problem facing educational software authors is that programming has no
top. In other words, the moment a program is finished a potential user will ask for an
enhancement or modification to use the program in a new context. Scriptable general-purpose
applets, such as Physlets, provide a partial solution since the user can specify the applet's
behavior provided that the applet author has anticipated the need. But this is not enough.
Curriculum authors usually want to process the data and to present it in various formats. Over
the past year the functionality of Physlets has been greatly extended through the use of
inter-applet communication. This makes it possible to use a modular object-oriented approach
for the design of interactive curricular material. Many Physlets, including Animator, EField,
BField, and Faraday, are now capable of generating data in response to an internal clock or in
response to user actions. This data can then be passed to a bar graph, a table of numeric
values, or an x-y graph using one line of JavaScript to establish the communication link. This
technique is very flexible since the code to process and present the data is written in an
interpreted runtime environment. Furthermore, web servers can customize the code as the
document is being delivered for applications such as testing and online homework. Examples of
interactive curricular material that makes use of these techniques will be presented.
This project is generously supported by NSF, DUE-9752365. |