It is undertaking activities to improve the image of engineering as a field of study and as a profession, to attract and retain students and professionals. We promote the innovative use of information technologies to attract and inspire teachers and learners and to extend and integrate engineering knowledge across disciplines, institutions, and throughout society over the individual's entire career. Asynchronous communication is also supported. The software is being piloted in Spanish, Russian, and Japanese language courses being offered simultaneously at Davis and Berkeley. We have constructed a series of Java applets, each of which is essentially a graphing calculator that is pre-programmed with a particular equation.
Students input values on a Web page form, then click on a button to draw the graph.
Hands-on experimentation with graphical software replaces complex mathematical language as means of communicating the subject matter. There is no computer literacy requirement, and the first week of instruction is devoted to the necessary software. It includes audio and video clips as well as text and links to other pages on the course topic and other related topics. In parallel, we are establishing methodologies and implementing educational outcomes analyses to evaluate the effectiveness of this training environment. The site features explanations of the research design, background information on the site, regular narrative reports of the progress on the archeological work, and images of significant finds.