Antenna theory education tool using an interactive and movie-based electronic book

A virtual tool (electronic book) for antenna theory and electromagnetic propagation is presented. A variety of radiation and electromagnetic problems ranging from linear antennas to arrays, radiation in time domain, microstrip antennas, smart antennas, and reflectors can be simulated. The material is useful both at undergraduate and graduate engineering courses. The education tool uses a user-friendly interface thanks to Mathcad^reg software package which has been used to develop the electronic book. Moreover, navigation throughout the book follows the same rules used by internet users, therefore, no extra knowledge have to be introduced on how to use the present tool. Besides the user-friendly interface, the book also features visualization capabilities, 3D representations and videos, which play a significant role in teaching. The electronic book comes with several exercise sections having twofold objectives: first, students can check their own progress, and second, data from such exercises is provided to professor/mentor. This data is extremely useful to determine whether a given section can be considered completely understood or some extra emphasize needs to be done. All the material presented in the book can be complemented by extra peer review scientific papers given at the end of each section, most of them can be downloaded (obviously, depending on the contract between university and editorial). The book has been tested using objective data resulting in good acceptance.