FISICA 2005 : A COMMUNITY PORTAL FOR CREATION OF EDUCATIONAL MATERIAL AND ITS DISSEMINATION TO ITALIAN HIGH SCHOOL

To create online educational material on physics phenomena using an interactive site accessible to both high school teachers and students.

We start by copying physics simulations freely available on Internet in a database. Then we create educational units, one for each of these simulations, so teachers can use them to clarify their explanations in the classroom. All the accumulated material can be downloaded and used offline without access to Internet.

The presentation card

We hope that this portal increases the use of Physics online material in high schools. The possibility to use this material offline will be of much help to schools with poor Internet connections. We hope that the initial one hundred simulations become much more in the next years thanks to the teachers help. We expect that, when our project is known elsewhere in Italy, teachers from other regions will start to collaborate to it.

The hardware and software

We created a physics community portal a physics community portal at theat the address address http://www.ba.infn.it/%7efisi2005

C. EVANGELISTA1, M. S. MENNEA2, F. NUZZI3, A. REGANO1 AND G. ZITO2 1 - Dipartimento Interateneo di Fisica, via G. Amendola 173, 70126, Bari, Italy

2 - Sezione INFN di Bari, via G. Amendola 173, 70126, Bari, Italy

3 - Liceo Ginnasio O. Flacco, via N. Pizzoli 58, 70123 Bari, Italy

Objective

The simulations index page

A teacher can contribute in different ways: 1) by means of wiki, he can write some educational cards for simulations already existing in the site, informing the site managers by e-mail, so that the new cards can be stored and made available to everyone; 2) if he is interested in some simulation freely available on Internet, he has to inform the site managers, who upload the simulation in the simulations database. The upload of files in wiki is not allowed; every upload is made by the site managers to avoid that protected material is inserted in the portal, causing legal troubles to the managers

Clicking on the image, one can access the Java appletClicking on “Scheda”, one can access the work card

•PHP/Perl - scripting languages•phpMyAdmin - program PHP to manage the simulations database mediaWiki - software in PHP to manage Wiki simple programs in Perl are used in some maintenance operations•MySQL - relational database•Apache - Web server•Linux - operating system•Java - programming language programs written in this language are used in some maintenance operations

We used the “LAMP” platform, that is Linux+ Apache+MySQL+PHP/Perl. All the used software is available free of charge on this platform and can run on a cheap Intel computer. However it is required a fast connection to Internet and the management by a person having a good knowledge of Linux.

m-ICTE2005

Each simulation is represented by an icon, which describes the simulation type (Java applet, Flash animation, animated gif). Clicking on the simulation’s icon, one can access its presentation card

The form above is used to store all the informations about a simulation in the database. These informations are used to create the presentation card on the left.To memorize the simulations we use a MySQL database. Every simulation and all the accompanying material is memorized in a unique directory. This directory contains the simulation as well as a simulation image and a file which executes the simulation itself. Also the educational cards are inserted in this directory and memorized as addresses in the database.

To write educational cards we use Mediawiki software, the same software used to write the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia. One can connect to the Web page containing the cards and modify the cards by means of this software. So, every card is the result of a collective work. Anyway, the work of the main authors is acknowledged and their names are indicated in the wiki page in which the cards index appears. This is the only protected page and can be modified only by the site managers. A special account called wikisysop is used to edit this page and to monitor the site in order to avoid modifications done by vandals: Wiki memorizes all the modifications in its own database (a MySQL database, but not the same as that used for the simulations), whereas wikisysop can cancel the effect of the single modification. For safety measure Wiki runs on a computer different from the one containing the simulations database.

Teachers contribution

Everyone can download the educational material on a device (hard disk or cd-rom) and use it offline, clicking on “Download” in the portal homepage and following the instructions.Every now and then we save all the dynamical pages in the site as HTML pages, adding the contents of all the simulations files. In this way we have a complete copy of the site which we can store on a cd-rom ready to be used give by teachers; in addition we obtain a zipped file which everybody can download on his own computer. The person who downloads the site material must accept the use licence. Some simulations also contain a file with the use licence of the simulation author: this file is downloaded together with the software.

Download on cd-romLAMP Stack

PHP/Perl/Python

MySQL

Apache

Linux

The work card

The page to insert a simulation

The page to modify the work card

The navigation bar contains four entries: 1. “Home“ links to the home page2. “Moduli didattici” opens a page containing the simulations index. The simulations are classified in eight categories:

Cinematica, Dinamica, Termodinamica, Elettromagnetismo, Onde, Statica e Dinamica dei fluidi, Altri argomenti3. ” WikiFisica 2005“ links to the website “wiki”, to create or modify the work cards.4. ”Download“ allows to download the whole site as a zipped file Clicking on the icon , one can access the database, the only protected area: it is reserved to the site managers and is

used to insert a simulation in our site, or to modify the presentation card of a simulation