Work in progress – some demos here now, more coming soon
This section hosts the demonstration software that I write for use in lectures, labs and workshops. I started writing in Visual Basic, but after Microsoft stopped supporting VB6 and replaced it with an incompatible language I switched to C#, and eventually to Silverlight (so the demos can be run direct from most browsers). Now that Microsoft has stopped supporting Silverlight, I’ve moved to Javascript.
For more details of the demos available, see:
I’ve had some inquiries about whether copies of these demos are available for download so they can be run from local hard-drives (it’s not always a good idea to trust the live Internet in a lecture, and the on-line demos are liable to change at any time as I add new features). The answer is (mostly) “yes provided they are not used for profit”, but there are some conditions.
I justify my time writing these things to my bosses by telling them they contribute to pedagogic research. Which they do – I have written a couple of papers about them already (see for example “A Case Study in the Use of Animated Visual Models in Communications Engineering Education”, Dave Pearce and Phil Barker, ASEE Annual Conference, Louisville, June 20-23, 2010. http://soa.asee.org/paper/conference/paper-view.cfm?id=23508).
For this work I need feedback from educators and students. So, the deal is that I am happy to make available copies of these demos provided you agree to help with some research about using them. This could be as simple as filling in an on-line questionnaire in the future, making available any relevant course feedback comments, that sort of thing. Or even better, persuading your students to fill in an on-line questionnaire.
If anyone would like to collaborate on some pedagogic research using animated demos please get in touch – I’d be interested to talk about running some more formal experiments and studies and would be happy to adapt the demos if required.