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Extending EPIC: Interactive Courseware in Engineering

Teaching methods prevalent in our universities have largely remained unchanged, in spite of the opportunities that exist because of the near revolutionary advances in IT. The general aim of this work would be to identify the specific IT requirements for developing courseware for engineering courses which have a computational content.

Following last year's (successful) SSP project ``Teaching High Performance Computing via the World Wide Web'' we would like to continue to ``explore various possibilities to use the WWW to promote the awareness and use of HPC.'' EPIC allows students to study at their own learning pace and also offers the possibility of distance learning. Users can interact with the course being followed by executing programs and applications on their local machines while accessing the course material remotely. The learner is thus able to concentrate on the course content and not system specific issues.

This proposal aims to extend EPIC package in two main ways:

addition of further interaction by developing tools and exemplar applications embedded within the course material using Java/JavaScript. These simulations would allow students to study the effects of changing simulation parameters and numerical techniques used in an interactive manner from widely available Web browsers (e.g. Netscape 2.0).
provision of a mechanism within EPIC that allows users to add material to the existing course in addition to incorporating the potential for self assessment. It would also be worthwhile exploring the possibility of porting EPIC to work within a PC environment thus vastly increasing the user base for the package.

We propose to build and apply these new EPIC tools to implement parts of an engineering course: Matrix analysis of structures, on the Engineering departmental web server. In addition to the theory of structural analysis students will be taught to use computer programs for analysing framed structures. The SSP students will be provided with HTML versions of the course that will be converted to use EPIC. The division of labour amongst the students will be as set below. Some collaboration will be required to ensure compatibility and unison of effort. The tools developed will be sufficiently general to be applied to other and future courses, both in Engineering and EPCC. These developments will enhance the capabilities of EPIC to teach HPC within EPCC and further afield.

Proposed Work plans

Student 1

Week1 Training course
Week 2-3 Learn Java/Java Script
Week 4-5 Study the relevant course notes, exercises and computing tutorials to identify areas where interactiveness is required and specify simulation to be implemented in Java
Week 6-8 Implement Java version of structural analysis solver chosen above.
Week 9 Integrate the new functionality and interactiveness into EPIC
Week 10 Report

Student 2

Week1 Training course
Week 2-3 Gain an understanding of EPIC, Perl and the Perl scripts that make EPIC work
Week 4-5 Explore the possibility of either extending the Perl scripts to work within a PC environment or placing all the functionality within the browser
Week 6-8 Develop a framework which allows users to add to the course material and provide some form of self assessment, implementing the necessary Perl scripts.
Week 9 Integrate the new functionality and interactiveness into EPIC
Week 10 Report

Expertise Required

Some programming experience (preferably in C or OOP concepts) and be familiar with basic mathematics to understand the course. Basic understanding of the Web and possibly HTML. Training will be provided.

Resources Required

Workstation and access to a WWW server. Access to a Solaris or Windows NT platform would be desirable to compile Java code, as well as Web browser which will support JavaScript/Java applets (Netsape2.0).

Resources Supplied

Training materials for Java are available on-line from EPCC, which also includes a wide range of Java examples and ``Applications Developers Kit''. Some standard structural analysis FORTRAN codes used in the course. These codes require a miniscule amount of CPU time (on a PC) for the examples normally used in the course.

Neil P Chue Hong and Yazann Romahi worked on this project.

Compressed PostScript of the project's final reports are available: Yazann's here (161 kbytes) and Neil's here (146 kbytes).

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