To achive this, an authoring system was developed over a long period by a succession of research students as a Computers in Teaching Initiative project. Kent has a campus network to which all machines are linked, from laboratories, teaching rooms and study bedrooms. The principle behind the project was that a suite of teacher-designed programs would be established on the host, giving access at all times to all routines, and no programming skill would be needed by the student. The system should be long lasting to justify investment, but individual programs could be readily updated. The software would work in an interactive rather than a demonstration mode, and would provide an investigative tool for project work.
Students log in to get the main menu, then a submenu for their chosen topic.
All submenus include tutorial advice as well as examples, and the facility to print out results. The emphasis is on graphical displays, and although windowing is not available, four iterations can be shown on screen for comparison purposes. Students have access to advanced plotting and printing facilities, as these are also on the network. Concurrent compilation means that a student can enter a function at run time without loss of speed in evaluation. The programs are designed not merely to give the answer using techniques such as Gaussian elimination, but to give the student insight into the method used.