Laurence A. Marschall, PASA, 17 (2), 129.
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Prospects for Future Development
Project CLEA's plans for the next two years include the development of three more exercises. The one under current development is called "The Search for Object X", which is meant to be a capstone exercise for students who have previously performed other CLEA exercises. Like a chemistry laboratory exercise in qualitative analysis, where students are asked to determine the composition of a white powder, the "Object X" lab asks students to determine the nature of an astronomical object for which only the coordinates are specified. They can use a CCD, photometer, spectrometer, or radio telescope to investigate the "white blob" that is their object, using techniques and information learned from earlier CLEA labs to analyze their observations and draw a reasoned conclusion from the data.Two other exercises planned for further development include (1) an exercise on radial velocity measurements of binary stars and the search for extrasolar planets; and (2) an exercise on variable stars and the Cepheid distance scale. With the completion of these exercises, CLEA will have available an even dozen laboratory experiments covering many of the major techniques of modern astronomy.
We plan to continue developing our exercises for the Windows platform, but there is a growing interest among our users in educational software which can be run on browsers and actually run over the Web. Though there is some astronomy software already available in Java, we have not yet found the web amenable to the highly interactive demands of our programs. But we are studying the situation closely, and intend to develop some prototypes of web-based exercises within the next two years. As the capabilities of both computers and the Internet grow, we will doubtless see the development of some exciting new applications of simulations for the astronomy laboratory.
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