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In Winter quarter, Nelson Lee worked on
- tutorial animations in Flash
- porting LATEX to CNXML format
Nelson's initial Flash animations and Connexions test modules are listed in the
following two subsections below.
CNXML format is used by the Connexions project at
Rice University, which is one website where we plan to host our final
teaching materials for global accessibility. LATEX is a standard
word-processing language for the mathematical/scientific community,
and Julius has four relevant on-line books written in this format,
parts of which will be ported into the planned teaching materials.
At the beginning of the quarter, Nelson and Julius met for a couple of
hours with Cammy Huang-DeVoss at Wallenberg who generously gave us an
in-depth look at how she developed animated visualizations and other
teaching aids, primarily in Flash. We discussed our overall goals and
how they might best be accomplished. We obtained invaluable input and
orientation from Cammy. In particular, it was this meeting that
convinced us that Flash was the right choice of animation technologies
at present.
Since the focus of the planning grant is to prototype an acoustics
laboratory assignment on vibrating strings using the proposed
technology, Nelson's initial Flash projects were concerned with
simulating vibrating strings in various ways. These animations will
be utilized in the ``theory background'' section of the string
laboratory assignment under development. Much of the theory
background section will be adapted from the text for Music 420
(``Signal Processing Models in Musical Acoustics''). Several of the
figures in this text would be far clearer if animated, and so two were
chosen as initial Flash simulation targets. They are listed in
§8.1 above, and serve their intended purpose beautifully.
The flash animations developed this quarter have already been used
satisfactorily for in-class demonstrations in Music 420. The ability
to animate traveling waves on a string, pause the animation, discuss
what is happening, and resume to the next point of discussion, is
extremely valuable for teaching purposes.
In addition to these ``theory background'' animations, we plan to
construct animations corresponding to specific experiments in the lab
assignments under development. In the animations, one can see very
clearly what theory predicts, and the student can then check these
predictions experimentally, and look for the effects seen in the
theoretical simulations. Computer simulations can also be used to
check especially difficult measurements in the experimental set up.
Even for simple measurements, the theoretical simulation can be used
to check the student's recorded observations, alerting the student to
recheck when something appears to be out of range. The simulation can
check the student's results even when there are free parameters in the
experiment such as the precise striking point along the string. In
particular, the computer can independently estimate the striking point
from the recorded waveform in order to check that it agrees with
reported measurements.
Nelson also spent a significant portion of his time investigating how
to most efficiently port LATEX to the Connexions CNXML
format. Nelson joined the development team for that project and
tested its current functionality. He also made a couple of small test
modules at Connexions and an example course. (A ``course'' at
Connexions is a sequence of ``modules''.) In view of the level of
effort already under way in the Connexions project on porting LATEX to CNXML, we decided in early February to postpone work on the LATEX translation front and work more on laboratory animations development.
Nelson continued to receive assistance from Cammy Huang-DeVoss in that
effort.
We are hoping that by this summer, when we plan to finalize the
prototype web site, the LATEX-CNXML translation tools will be in a
reasonably usable state, so that we will not need to do a lot of
development ourselves. However, based on discussions with Connexions
developers, Julius plans to write a Perl script that maximally
automates the conversion of LATEX source to sTEX (``semantic
TEX'') source, which is the first step in the semi-automatic
translation to CNXML, as presently designed.
Finally, in preparation for laboratory development work, we are
starting to build a small electronics & acoustics laboratory in
Julius's CCRMA office (Knoll 306). Initial purchases planned include
an oscilloscope and basic tools for testing and constructing
electronic circuits, as well as tools needed for building the
acoustics laboratory set-up specified by the KTH team.
In addition, a laptop computer was purchased to support Nelson's
work on the project.
Subsections
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