Visual Interactive Simulation for Distance Education

The authors discuss the necessity of multiple flexible output forms in an educational Web simulation environment. Ideally, such an environment should allow the creation of visual, interactive simulations and their integration in the pages of theWeb document being constructed. As a suitable candidate for this, the authors propose their system to generate documents for theWeb that consists of three layers: continuous simulation language OOCSMP and its associated language layers SODA-1L and SODA2L. OOCSMP and SODA are compiled into Java applets and HTML/VRML pages by a compiler called C-OOL. Different output forms can be combined to solve and show the results of a simulation problem. The authors propose a procedure to guide the construction of educational courses on technical or scientific subjects with their tools. This procedure is used to enhance an existing educational Web course with a new page showing the simulation of a robot arm Unimation PUMA260.