Higher Ed Software
From the CD Intro:"The 1990s are witnessing significant improvements in the ways educators compute. At NeXT, computing environments are being designed to advance scholarship by providing sophisticated tools and a data-rich environment for learning and research.
This CD contains of some of the most exciting teaching and research being conducted with NeXT computers.
Ronald F.E. Weissman, Ph.D.
Director, Higher Education
NeXT Computer, Inc."
Higher Education Mailbox
The Higher Education Mailbox is a collection of some of the best NeXT-based academic research and instructional projects. The mailbox also provides information on the free software and publications available at public archive sites. The mailbox has 18 messages. The first is an introductory message from the director of higher education, Ron Weissman. The following 14 messages are divided into four disciplines: Natural Sciences, Humanities, Math and Physics, and Music and Signal Processing. The last three messages describe Public Domain resources.
Each message begins with a header of the following format:
Date: Mon, 1 July 91 12:00:00 PDT
From: discipline (i.e. Humanities)
To: NeXT Colleagues
Subject: project title - university (i.e. Stay Tooned, Stanford University)
The body of each message has, in order, the following contents:
- An image.
- A caption describing the image and the academic project.
- A blurb highlighting the NeXT features that made the project possible.
- One or more of the following attachments: a courseware application, an article, a Mathematica Notebook, a PostScript graphic file, or Lip Service.
- Name, title, e-mail, and phone of the project manager.
Demoing the Higher Education Mailbox
You may want to do the following:
Explain the multimedia features of NeXTmail. Explain to your customers that they are looking at a standard NeXTmail mailbox.
Read the captions found under the images. The captions are the only part of the message that describe the displayed applications, research tools, or courses.
Read the feature blurb. The highlighted features of NeXT computers made the displayed application, research tool, or course possible. Without these features, the application, research tool, or course would have been difficult or impossible to develop.
Let your customers play with the attachments. Let them use the applications and read the documents. If you have a printer connected to your NeXT computer, you may want to print the documents and give them to interested customers.
Point out the contact information. Interested customers should feel free to contact anyone whose phone number or e-mail address is listed. These contacts will be able to tell customers more about their work.
IMPORTANT: Each message is designed to fit on one 8" x 11" piece of paper. You can print them and give them to interested customers. You can also print messages and use them as flyers or to create brochures.
Table of Contents
Message Category Message Title
1. Ronald Weissman Welcome to NeXT in Higher Education
2. Natural Sciences MidasPlus: Molecular Modeling and Design - University of California, San Francisco
3. Natural Sciences Advanced Concepts in Geology - University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
4. Natural Sciences Biology Laboratory Simulations - California State University, Los Angeles (CSULA)
5. Humanities Stay Tooned: Foreign Language Learning Tools - Stanford University
6. Humanities Brass Casting in West Africa: A Multimedia Archive - Michigan State University
7. Humanities Tarski's World: Philosophy Courseware - Stanford University
8. Humanities The Writing Library: A Library of Writing Problems and Solutions - Allegheny College
9. Math and Physics High Energy Physics Research Tools - Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
10. Math and Physics Advanced Calculus Instruction with Mathematica - University of Nebraska, Lincoln
11. Math and Physics PhaseScope: Differential Equation Courseware - University of Houston-Clear Lake
12. Math and Physics An Integrated Engineering Curriculum: Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology
13. Music and Signal Processing SPASM: A Physical Model of the Human Vocal Tract - CCRMA
14. Music and Signal Processing Bessie: Frequency Modulation Synthesis Courseware - Skidmore College
15. Music and Signal Processing Linear Systems Theory with Mathematica: Georgia Institute of Technology
16. Public Domain Archive Sites Provide Free Software
17. Public Domain Archives Have Useful Publications
18. Public Domain Games!
Higher Education Mailbox Contents
The following is a description of each message in the Higher Education Mailboxes. The numbers correspond to the messages number in the mailbox.
1. Welcome To NeXT in Higher Education
A brief introduction to the mailbox from Ron Weissman, Director of Higher Education.
To Do: A voice message from Ron -
Double-click the lips to hear Ron's message.
2. MidasPlus: Molecular Modeling and Design - University of California, San Francisco
Developed at the School of Pharmacy at UCSF, MidasPlus is the premier molecular modeling and design package. Before being ported to NeXT computers, MidasPlus required extremely expensive hardware (usually Silicon Graphics Iris workstations) so chemists and biologists had to share workstations with labmates. NeXT computers make possible desktop molecular modeling - one workstation per researcher, instructor, or student.
To Do: Learning More
For people interested in molecular modeling, open and print the article from NeXT on Campus.
Warning: This message contains a full-color image of a 3D-molecule and takes several seconds to load.
3. Advanced Concepts in Geology - University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Because students can use Mathematica to handle difficult calculations, professors are able to teach a course in advanced concepts in geology to undergraduates or first-year graduates. These students may have only a basic calculus background. In the past, similar courses have been offered only to advanced graduate students with extensive mathematical background.
To Do: Learning More -
The WriteNow document contains an abstract from an NSF proposal describing the geomathematics course. The Draw documents contain figures for the abstract.
4. Biology Laboratory Simulations - California State University, Los Angeles (CSULA)
The faculty at CSULA have adopted a visual approach to mathematics and sciences. They are developing "virtual laboratory" experiments for disciplines ranging from biology to mathematics to geology. In addition, Faculty members have received an NSF grant and matching university funds to implement the "Interactive Electronic Blackboard for Natural Science and Mathematics," a laboratory of 25 NeXTstation Color computers.
The two courseware applications in the message are from the biology department. The first, flyLab teaches Mendelian genetics - the inheritance of genetic traits. The second, Competition, provides a graphical model of species competing for natural resources.
To Do: Demoing the Biology Applications -
flyLab
1. Double-click flyLab.
2. Drag two flies into the Mating window's two wells.
3. Click Mate.
4. A window with the flies offspring will appear.
5. You can drag offspring into the Mating window to create a new generation of flies.
Warning: The current version of flyLab does not let you view the changes you have made to the flies. All the flies look the same.
Competition
1. Double-click Competition.
2. Choose Show Equilibrium from the box in the lower right hand corner of the window. When you click start, an equilibrium point will appear in the chart.
3. Click Start.
4. Create initial population sizes for the two species by clicking in the chart. The X coordinate of your click will be the initial population size for species 1, the Y coordinate will be the initial population size for species 2.
5. Notice how the populations grow or shrink over time. Eventually they will reach the equilibrium point and remain constant.
6. Click a few more times to add new populations and watch how the new populations effect the growth of the existing ones.
5. Stay Tooned: Foreign Language Learning Tools - Stanford University
Beginning foreign language students often become bored and frustrated because they have difficulty reading and expressing complex ideas in the language they are studying. Stay Tooned helps solve this problem by presenting complex stories in a dialog based cartoon. Students read and hear the dialog in both the target language and translation. After reading and listening to an story created by an instructor, students write their own dialogs and record their own voices. Because the story is presented in cartoon form, and the translation is immediately accessible, the stories can be challenging and interesting. Stay Tooned is a truly interactive language lab.
To Do: Demoing Stay Tooned -
Although the application is not included in the mailbox, some dialog is included as Lip Service lips. Play both the French and the English. Notice that both the words and exclamations have been translated.
6. Brass Casting in West Africa: A Multimedia Archive - Michigan State University
Brass Casting is a multimedia archive created with MediaStation. The archive was created as a model for a course in Africa and the African Diaspora.
To Do: Listening to the libation prayer -
Before each casting, the blacksmith pours a libation to the furnace and recites a prayer. Double-click the lips to hear the prayer said during the libation.
7. Tarski's World: Philosophy Courseware - Stanford University
Developed at Stanford's Center for Studies in Language and Intelligence, Tarski's World teaches first order logic. Originally developed for the Macintosh, Tarski's World is the second best selling Macintosh courseware application.
Tarski's World has been rewritten for the NeXT and has several advantages over the Macintosh version. These include: performance, the ability to open multiple documents, and a smoother, cleaner interface. Development of the NeXT version of Tarksi's World was completed by a part-time student programmer in less than 1 year. An IBM version is being developed in parallel with the NeXT version, but the programmers have yet to develop a working prototype (a testament to the ease of the NeXT development environment).
To Do: Demoing Tarski's World -
1. Double-click Tarski's World.
2. Choose a sentence or a world file from the Exercises folder, or choose cancel to create your own.
3. Place some different shaped blocks in the world by clicking and releasing one of the three buttons with block shapes in them (Do not try to drag the blocks onto the world).
4. Go to the Inspector window, pull down on the pop-up list and select Block. Use the Block inspector to change the shape and size of some of the blocks.
5. Double-click the Sentence window to get the text cursor.
6. Use the Keyboard panel to enter a first-order logic sentence. Try "x(Cube(x)). Which means "Every object in the world is a cube." In order for this sentence to be true, every object in the world must be a cube.
7. Switch to the Sentence inspector and click the Yes box next to WFF. Click verify to see if your sentence is a Well Formed Formula (WFF). Now select Yes for sentence and hit verify to see if you have written a syntactically correct sentence. Finally select Yes for True and click verify to see if the sentence is true for your world.
8. If your sentence was false, click Game and Tarski's World will lead you through your logic and show you where you went wrong.
8. The Writing Library: A Library of Writing Problems and Solutions - Allegheny College
The Writing Library was created so that students could ask writing-related questions of each other and answer the questions. It is a local-network-wide bulletin board system. Students enter problems into a problem window. Other students read the problem and respond by entering the solution in the window.
To Do: Demoing The Writing Library -
1. Double-click the Writing Library.
2. Select Word Choice in the topics browser.
3. Select Sentence Variation and click open. A student's problem will appear in the problem window.
4. Select "Finding the right word" and click open. A student's solution will appear in the solutions window.
5. From the tools menu, choose Add Topic, Add Problem, or Add Solution to add your own topic, problem, or solution.
9. High Energy Physics Research Tools - Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
Researchers at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center are creating a suite of new analysis tools to replace their current difficult-to-use FORTRAN programs. The first application developed at SLAC is called Reason. Reason lets users create statistical analysis chains using the mouse. Information gleaned from Reason is displayed with interactive histograms. The histograms can then be opened in an application called Minuit. Minuit is a replacement for an older FORTRAN program named MINUIT (all capitals). Minuit fits functions to the histograms created by Reason. The final application, Gismo, lets researchers design and test particle detectors.
To Do: Learning More -
Because of the complexity of these applications, they have not been included in the mailbox. The mailbox contains a paper, written by the applications' developer, Paul Kunz, which describes the three applications and the reasons why he is moving away for FORTRAN-based research tools. Print the paper for customers interested in learning more.
10. Advanced Calculus Instruction with Mathematica - University of Nebraska, Lincoln
Instructors at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, have made advanced calculus more exciting by using Mathematica. Because Mathematica can be used to solve problems too complex to solve by hand, students can be assigned difficult exercises that have direct, real-world applications.
To Do: Finding out the Time of Death (Mathematica 1.2 or 2.0 must be installed to do this) -
Customers interested in seeing a variety of Notebooks should be encouraged to open and read the five Notebooks. Others may just be interested in the Notebook entitled "Newton's Cooling Law." In this Notebook, a detective measures a murder victim's body temperature and uses Newton's cooling law to determine the time of death.
11. PhaseScope: Differential Equation Courseware - University of Houston - Clear Lake
To help students understand the abstract notion of differential equations, Professor Mike Mezzino at the University of Houston, Clear Lake, developed a program to graph systems of differential equations. This program, called PhaseScope, uses Mathematica to solve systems of differential equations. PhaseScope then uses the metaphor of an oscilloscope to animate the solutions.
To Do: Learning More -
The text document is an article from NeXT on Campus. Customers interested in learning more should read or print it.
To Do: Demoing PhaseScope (You must have Mathematica 2.0 installed to do this) -
1. Double-click PhaseScope.
2. Choose an example form the Examples menu. Only the Lorenz Attractor is 3D, but it takes a while to integrate. The system of equations will be inserted in the Equations box.
3. Click the Run button (it is in the upper right-hand corner).
4. When the system is done integrating, the resulting animation will appear in the black box.
12. An Integrated Engineering Curriculum: Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology
Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, a four year engineering college, has taken an innovative approach to teaching first-year engineering students. The school offers an intensive curriculum that integrates mathematics and physics. With faculty supervision, eight undergraduates have developed over 40 NeXT-based courseware applications to accompany the curriculum. These include: Physics World, which lets students create worlds of particles, connections between particles, electric, gravitational, and magnetic fields, and boundaries; Riemann, which demonstrates various methods for finding the area under a curve; and Skiing, which tests one's knowledge of derivatives and their physical manifestations.
To Do: Demoing Physics World -
1. Double-click Physics World
2. Choose Open form the Document menu and select a file (try chargebox.phwld).
3. Click start.
4. Watch for a while.
5. Click stop.
6. Close the current world and choose New form the Document menu to create a new one.
7. Use the Particle, Field, Boundary and Connection editors to put items in your new world.
8. Click Init to see the new items.
9. Click start to see what happens to the particles in your world.
To Do: Demoing Riemann -
1. Double-click Riemann
2. Enter a number in the "Number of Intervals" field (5 is a good number).
3. Use the Function and Method pop-up-lists to compare different methods for computing the area under various curves.
To Do: Demoing Skiing (Do this only on monochrome systems) -
1. Double-click Skiing
2. In the Killer Slope window, select numbers (starting with 0) and use the arrow buttons to raise and lower the slope above the number. You are trying to create a slope for the skier so that s/he will trace out the distance, velocity, and acceleration pictured in the Graphs window.
3. When satisfied with your slope, click "See if the one works". When the skier reaches the end of the slope, Skiing will graph the skiers distance, velocity, and acceleration in the Graphs window.
4. To see the answer, click Give Up.
To Do: Learning More -
1. If Physics World is not already running, double-click it.
2. Choose Info Panel from Physics World's main menu.
3. Click Contact Info. A panel with more information about the integrated curriculum project will appear.
13. SPASM: A Physical Model of the Human Vocal Tract - CCRMA
SPASM, developed by Dr. Perry Cook at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) lets users directly manipulate the human vocal tract and hear the synthesis in real time. The built-in digital signal processor (DSP) is used to implement a model of the vocal tract and the glottal waveform used to excite the tract. In addition, noise sources can be injected along the vocal tract where the constriction and air flow rate indicate turbulence should occur; this provides very human sounding synthesis.
To Do: Listening to SPASM Sing
The three Lip Service lips hold three different sound files generated by SPASM.
To Do: Demoing SPASM
1. Double-click SPASM.
2. Click some of the buttons in the Demo panel to hear some demonstration sounds.
3. Click "sounds/machines" in the Demo panel to compare older synthesis methods to SPASM.
4. Click the large knife switch that says Quiet and Sing on it. SPASM will start singing.
5. Adjust the sliders in the Vocal Tract Editor Panel to adjust the shape of the vocal tract.
6. Click the knife switch again to make SPASM stop singing.
14. Bessie: Frequency Modulation Synthesis Courseware - Skidmore College
Frequency Modulation (FM) synthesis is one of the most powerful and popular music synthesis methods. It is the method of synthesis used by Yamaha for its line of DX and SY musical keyboards. FM synthesis is fairly complex and counter-intuitive to the beginning computer music student. Bessie is a combination tutorial and interactive computer music laboratory. A series of tutorial windows teach various concepts ranging from the basics of sound to FM theory. While reading the tutorials, students can use the Main Editor window to experiment with FM synthesis, and generate and save sounds. Bessie makes heavy use of both the built-in digital signal processor and the Music Kit.
To Do: Listening and Viewing a Sound Generated by Bessie
The Lip Service lips hold a simple sound generated by Bessie. Double-click the lips and press Play in the Lip Service panel to listen to the sound. Then click edit to view the sound's waveform. Notice that the waveform is very regular. Click edit again to close the waveform window. Then record your own voice. Click edit again to view your voice's waveform. Compare this to the waveform generated by Bessie.
To Do: Demoing Bessie
1. Double-click Bessie.
2. In the Main Editor window, click "Turn on Sound (grab DSP)." This will reserve the DSP for Bessie. Make your you quit Bessie or click "Turn Sound Off (free DSP)" before using sounds in any other program.
3. Click Play Note to hear the current note.
4. Adjust the sliders to change the sound envelope, FM parameters and Vibrato. Try playing the note again.
5 If you or your customers would like to learn more about FM synthesis, you can read some tutorials by choosing items from the Tutorial menu.
15. Linear Systems Theory with Mathematica: Georgia Institute of Technology
Instructors at the Georgia Institute of Technology are teaching signal processing with Mathematica. They have developed extensive Mathematica packages - Mathematica programs that perform signal processing transforms - and instructional Notebooks. The Notebooks lead students through lessons designed to teach them difficult concepts in signal processing.
To Do: Showing NeXT computers' advantages over other Mathematica computers
This message contains a PostScript chart comparing NeXT computers to other computers that run Mathematica. Double-click the PostScript file, print it (it is not very readable on the screen), and give it to anyone who would like a straightforward comparison of NeXT computers, Macintosh computers, Sun workstations, and IBM personal computers. You may want to print the chart, make some copies, and hand it out as a flyer.
To Do: Learning More About the Signal Processing Packages and Notebooks (Mathematica 1.2 or 2.0 must be installed to do this)
The message contains a Mathematica Notebook. Open the Notebook to learn more about the signal processing packages and Notebooks. The Notebook describes the contents of the packages and Notebooks and explains where customers can get free copies of both.
16. Archive Sites Provide Free Software
Public archive sites are computers throughout the world that serve as depositories for public domain software, publications, and other resources. Most public archives are accessible via the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) program. The FTP program is a included with every NeXT computer. To learn how to use FTP, use the Digital Librarian to search "UNIX Manual Pages" for the keyword "FTP".
To Do: Trying the free software
Included in this message are three public domain applications: JumpBack, Mixer, and AltDock. JumpBack is a utility for backing up hard drives. Mixer lets users mix sound files. AltDock creates a second application dock.
17. Archives Have Useful Publications
In addition to public domain software, the public archives hold publications ranging from answers to technical questions to user group newsletters.
To Do: Reading the publications
NeXTanswers is a compendium of technical questions and their answers. To use NeXTanswers, drag the NeXTanswers icon onto a Digital Librarian bookshelf and search it for keywords of interest.
NeXT on Campus is a three-times-a-year publication from the NeXT Higher Education Group. Customers can receive free subscriptions to NeXT on Campus by printing the subscription card on page 39, filling it out, and returning it to:
NeXT on Campus
NeXT Computer, Inc.
900 Chesapeake Drive
Redwood City, CA 94063
The NeXT User Journal is a publication of BuzzNUG, the Georgia Institute of Technolgy's NeXT user group. It is full of useful reviews and technical information.
SCaNeWS is the newsletter for the Southern California NeXT users group.
NeXus is the English version of a newsletter from the NeXT User Society, Tokyo.
18. Games!
NeXT computers are powerful tools for business, research, scholarly publishing, and so on. They can also be fun. This message contains a sampling of public domain (free) games available for NeXT computers.
BoinkOut - A whacked out break-out. Try it in color.
Tetris - The classic, super-addictive, strategy game from the Soviet Union.
Robots - Another classic. Avoid running into deadly robots while tricking them into destroying themselves.
Reversi - A strategy game. Try to flip all the pieces to your color while the other player tries to flip them back. The computer plays a challenging game when set to the most difficult level.
Chinese Chess - An new strategy board game.
BlastApp - A straightforward destroy-everything-in-sight arcade game. Looks great in color.