Note to Self
With the fall semester of genchem winding down, I’m imagining how the lab will look next year. Although this may not all get accomplished in the first year, the major features of the tech component I’m trying to develop should be:
A central website that has:
- short movies showing critical lab techniques
- an online version of the lab procedures with links to the movies and other useful information
- prelab powerpoint presentations with links to prelab quizzes
- a shared database of data gathered in lab
- a way to access individual student data as well as lab-averaged data
- simulation tools that the students can use pre- and post-lab to help understand the analysis techniques and quantitatively investigate how
certain errors affect calculated results.
I’m building simulation tools in Excel and will be trying to integrate Flash to provide a way to graphically manipulate the terms in critical equations (I have no idea what I’m doing yet, but I just got my hands on a copy of Flash). This spring and summer I’ll need to build the website, make some movies, and whip up some useful simulations. The IT’s at UMW are going to have to help me with (a) the database stuff, (b) integrating the movies with the site, and (c) think about how to integrate the Flash/Excel simulation stuff into the site.
I think that’s all for now. Bye, blog.
jmorello said,
November 28, 2006 @ 10:58 pm
I like the slightly modified look of the blog, but I’m wondering why you have set it up so that one has to log in to leave a comment? What was your thinking there?
Even though I did get the excel sheet with macros to open on my machine, I never was able to get it to work like it was supposed to. I tried changing values, and nothing happened. I wonder what I’m doing wrong . . .