A new approach to interactive tutorial software for engineering education

The experimental tutorial software described in this paper is designed specifically for engineering education at the university level, and it is significantly different in purpose and structure from other educational software. Its goal is to help students understand, visualize, and connect basic concepts. It is not a design tool or a wealth of hyperlinked text or an infinite source of drill problems. It is intended to be a dynamic and flexible resource for instructors as well as students and to be used by groups as well as individuals. It takes advantage of currently available high-resolution graphics capability to go beyond what can reasonably be expected of textbooks or computer systems with small low-resolution displays. Since the software is written as an X Windows Motif application, it achieves a wide degree of platform independence for workstations and PC’s. In addition, the tutorial set can be distributed without license fees or additional software acquisition costs for the user.