Exhibits
Exhibits
Documentation,
Tutorials and Example Sites
Lecture
Notes and Exercise Material
This course was given during the spring semester 1996, by Axel Brandenburg and Åke Nordlund. The main intent was to introduce General Relativity in such a way that the students would obtain hands-on computing and visualizing experience with elementary General Relativity problems. Originally, the plan for the examination was to require the students to produce a video, accompanied by a short written report. During the course, the idea came up to instead use WWW exhibits (similar to the Exhibits of the NCSA Relativity Group) for the examination. The students embraced the idea whole-heartedly, and spent considerable time experimenting with various techniques for presentations and interactivity. The result was a very nice set of Exhibits. Eventually, we plan to merge these individual exhibits, that use a variety of techniques, into a single, more uniform permanent presentation.
The new examination format worked very well, but a word of warning is perhaps appropriate to teachers and students who wish to try something similar: WWW exhibits is a perfect example of ``Andersen's Law´´; they take more than twice the time you expect, even after you take account of Andersen's law... Good web tools should in principle simplify the task, but in practice one just tends to add more machinery (forms, java, frames, etc.) and Andersen's Law remains valid.
In addition to the exhibits, we make the lecture notes and exercise material available, with the qualifying remark that the material is neither intended nor suitable for self study, and that the exercises require access to files not (yet) available through the WWW. We may, at some later time, attempt to make the WWW material more self contained, by polishing the lecture notes, and by providing WWW access to all files necessary to run the exercises.
Documentation and tutorials on WWW related tools were provided as support for the project work, and may be of general interest. There are also a number of links to sites with GR related exhibitions on that page.
Last updated 02-aug-96 / [email protected]