Dear chemweb list members, I am hoping that some of you will be able to help us, please. We are in the process of developing a CAL application designed to help students to develop the skill of writing "curly arrow" reaction mechanisms, by giving a large number of examples to be used for practice, with feedback on incorrect attempts. The application has been written in Java, and is run from a web browser. At the moment, it is freely available to all; the title page is at http://www.abdn.ac.uk/chemistry/org/intro.hti. To the student, it is fully functional, and some introductory notes are provided (although teachers could provide their own notes, linked in to our Java applet). At present, we are in the process of conducting a fairly rigorous evaluation with our own students, with the help of our Learning Technology Unit; but we would like to have input from staff at other institutions, because we are keen that the application should be as useful as possible to the whole chemical community. We would very much welcome feedback from as many people as possible, and in particular, we would be interested in hearing from teachers who have been able to use it with their students. We hope to continue development in order that we can get information about how students use the application. We want to be able to log the errors they make, and eventually to be able to derive a continuous assessment mark from their use of the application. The Java was developed with the JDK development kit. On a PC, this means that Windows 95/98 or NT is required, and Netscape 4.06 minimum, 4.5 preferred. The application also will run on Internet Explorer 4, both on PC and Mac, although there are a few problems with this. At the last attempt (a few months ago) is would not run on Netscape for Mac - we�d welcome comments from any "Mac people" on this. Aberdeen is not a Mac site, so we don't have much opportunity for testing on that platform - we would greatly appreciate any comments about the reasons for the problems. Do any of you have experience of the JDK development kit? We have an evaluation questionnaire almost ready. I will mail a short version to this list when it is complete; I can mail a longer version to anyone who is willing to help us further. Regards Mary Masson ---------------------- Dr Mary Masson Academic Co-ordinator (and Webmaster) Department of Chemistry University of Aberdeen Meston Walk, Aberdeen AB24 3UE Tel. 01224 272931 m.masson@abdn.ac.uk chemweb: A list for Chemical Applications of the Internet. To post to list: mailto:chemweb@ic.ac.uk Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/chemweb/ To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@ic.ac.uk the following message; (un)subscribe chemweb List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@ic.ac.uk)