CS&E Laboratory

As a part of the new Computational Sciences and Engineering program, room CS111 has been designated the CS&ELab. This room, in conjunction with the research work being done for the SciencePad and Softlab projects will be converted into a prototype electronic classroom and laboratory of the future. The electronic classroom and laboratory will contain a variety of stationary multimedia machines connected to each other and to the wired network using wireless networks.
A variety of computer controllable audio (CD/DAT) and video (Optical Disk/S-VHS) presentation aids are being installed. There will be a "LiveBoard" for interactive discussions. Some virtual reality hardware will be used to bring in the telepresence dimension to the class and laboratory. In addition, the experimental equipment in the associated laboratories will all be computer controlled using General Purpose Interface Buss (GPIB) like systems. Videoconferencing facilities will allow lectures by outside speakers and students will interact with them using SciencePad. The scenario adopted for the electronic classroom assumes that the students and instructor have notebook computers running SciencePad to interact with one another and a LiveBoard. SciencePad will be used for a wide variety of tasks, including taking notes, receiving and submitting homeworks, monitoring student progress, and supporting the problem solving processes and experimentation required by each course.