Dr. Charles W. Fletcher

This project is not a lesson, but a tool to be used to construct interactive computational lessons. To present a computational lesson (even a multimedia one) on a computer without allowing the student to interact with the methods discussed is a waste of resources--a textbook would be just as useful. In order to teach modern computational methods (in particular, the use of "meta" languages such as Mathematics, Maple, and MatLab), educators and students must have access to these tools. However, this may not always be possible due to software costs, computer resources required, and other general overhead considerations. This is especially true among the two and four year colleges, and high schools.

The World Wide Web (WWW) and Internet provide a perfect media for accessing these tools. Since most educational centers (including a large number of high schools) are currently connected to the Internet for information access, thus student and educator access to the WWW is becoming universial. But providing a document ("Web pages") which describes the use of the software is not sufficient in educating a student in the use of that software. The student must interact with the software.

Using today's client/server technology this interaction may be achieved on the WWW. However, there are problems, primarily due to the stateless nature of the WWW. That is, servers can be provided which evaluate a single calculation, but all record of that calculation is lost in preparing for the next calculation, thus the continuity of the lesson may suffer. A method of maintaining the "state" is needed.

This implementation provides that interaction, thus enabling almost full access to the performance of such tools as Mathematica, Maple, and MatLab. (Footnote: Of course these products offer many features, including custom interfaces, which can never be fully captured with a remote server.)