Athena at 10 - Subsection 2

TODOR & GROWLTIGER In Project Athena's heyday there were few commercial software solutions to MIT's instructional problems. Faculty members who wanted to use Athena for instruction developed software ad hoc, with grants and other support from Project Athena. One major courseware project was a collection of simulation and analysis programs called TÓDOR. These programs permitted Aero/Astro students to simulate everything from flow across airfoils to orbital decay, using the computational power of Athena workstations to permit what-if "experiments" otherwise requiring wind-tunnel time or NASA involvement.

Today Aero/Astro students continue to use TÓDOR in class and outside, as the instructional changes it wrought have become instructional staples. But it has had other effects as well. Other departments soon recognized that fluid flows were fluid flows, for example, so that TÓDOR found users in Ocean Engineering and elsewhere. The project's principal investigator, Professor Earll Murman, went on to head Project Athena for some years, and then to become department Head - a dramatic counterexample to the myth that only peripheral faculty get involved with instructional computing, and only at risk to their careers. TÓDOR won a prestigious national EDUCOM Software Award. And how to use computers effectively figures more prominently in Aero/Astro's curriculum deliberations than it might have had TÓDOR not been so successful.

Similarly, courseware called GROWLTIGER gave students in Civil Engineering the tools to translate design and material attributes into computer-simulated bridges and other structures, and then to see how the simulated structures reacted to various loads and stresses. Before long this software was used in a few other departments as well (more on this under "Mechanical Engineering", below).

Yet two forces make success transitory for courseware like this.

- First, courseware generally arises to serve a specific instructional need. How it does so depends on the instructional context, which includes both the state of knowledge in the relevant field and the faculty member(s) who use the courseware. When either of these changes, the courseware's relevance changes, usually for the worse, and eventually it becomes "the courseware that Professor Doe used to use."
- Second, courseware authors usually work in a specific hardware and software environment. As hardware and software evolve, courseware often requires maintenance and revision. This usually is expensive. If the resources to maintain courseware aren't available, then the accessibility and functionality of the courseware decline.

The two forces work synergistically - it's difficult to find resources to maintain software that is becoming irrelevant, and ill-maintained software is more likely to become irrelevant.

Today the cost of developing and maintaining courseware like TÓDOR and GROWLTIGER is prohibitive within MIT, and in most other colleges and universities. In some cases we invest in revamping existing courseware, as ACS recently has done with GROWLTIGER. In other cases departments or individual faculty keep software up to date, but these have been exceptions rather than the rule. We rely increasingly on commercial software, more widely available for our environment than it once was, and on authoring systems that permit faculty to develop certain highly specific kinds of instructional software easily and portably.

# SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING

The School of Engineering is MIT's largest, in terms of departments, faculty, majors, subjects offered, core budgets - any measure one can imagine. The earliest plans for what became Project Athena arose from the School of Engineering, and the School was a major actor in the experiment's eight years. Professor Gerald Wilson, Dean of the School of Engineering during Project Athena, chaired Project Athena's faculty Executive Committee from the outset.

## 1 CIVIL & ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEERING

### Subjects

Subjects in Civil Engineering use computing in several distinct ways, with some overlap: programming, modeling and simulation, data analysis, design, and communication. For example,

- 1.00 Introduction to Computers and Engineering Problem Solving, which introduces C programming, uses C compilers and debuggers, In addition, 1.00 uses the MIT-developed, Athena-based, and award-winning NETWORKED EDUCATIONAL ONLINE SYSTEM (NEOS) for collecting and redistributing assignments.
- 1.38 Engineering Geology uses courseware called GEOLOGY TUTOR to teach students the fundamentals of geology. This multimedia courseware, developed with a Project Athena curriculum-development grant, uses the MUSE authoring language from the Center for Educational Computing Initiatives (CECI) on Sun workstations provided by Academic Computing Services. It provides text, still pictures, tools for highlighting geological features in pictures, workbook exercises, and quizzes.
- 1.12 Computer Models of Physical Engineering Systems uses MATLAB.
- 1.552 Computer Aided Engineering II helps students build computer-aided design (CAD) applications.
- 1.211J A Workshop on Geographic Information Systems, taught jointly with Urban Studies, uses ARCINFO and similar GIS applications to analyze and display location-specific data.

Professor Steven Lerman chairs the faculty Academic Computing Council.

### Facilities & Staff

Civil Engineering operates several somewhat autonomous educational-computing facilities, each involving some Athena equipment and some non-Athena equipment.

In the Parsons Laboratory, a small room houses five Athena workstations, a few other UNIX workstations, and a few personal computers. There are five additional Athena workstations in smaller facilities available to students, and several Athena workstations on faculty desks.

In Building 1, where the rest of Civil Engineering is located, there is one room housing four Athena workstations for 1.00 teaching assistants, and several smaller rooms with about four more. In addition, these rooms house several non-Athena workstations, including the two Sun workstations Athena provided to Professor Einstein so that he could continue working with GEOLOGY TUTOR. The Transportation Laboratory operates a cluster of DOS/WINDOWS machines and Macintoshes. Several additional Athena workstations are on faculty desks.

Historically Civil Engineering has employed a part-time staff member to oversee its computer facilities in the main buildings, and the Parsons Lab has staffed facilities located there. Teaching assistants provide additional support, especially in the large 1.00 programming subject.

## 2 MECHANICAL ENGINEERING

### Subjects

Many subjects in Mechanical Engineering use MAPLE, MATLAB, and other mathematical and analytic programs available on Athena. Some of this is formal, in that students receive direct instruction from in-class demonstrations or teaching assistants. Much of it is student-originated and informal. Some other subjects in Mechanical Engineering use more specific courseware developed for them. A subset of these were developed through Project Athena curriculum-development grants. The rest were developed using newer, simpler authoring tools.

2.01 Mechanics of Solids illustrates both kinds of ad hoc courseware. Initially 2.01 was an interesting example of cross-department sharing, as GROWLTIGER expanded from its original base in Civil Engineering to 2.01. More recently, 2.01 faculty began using a wider range of Athena services, including the XESS spreadsheet for calculations and OLTA for communications between students and teaching staff. Professor Louis Bucciarelli made some handouts available on Athena, including graphs and drawings. Soon he began using cT, an authoring language developed at Carnegie-Mellon University, to enhance online problem-set solutions by making the solutions interactive and portable (since cT-based materials run identically on Athena and on most Macintosh and DOS/WINDOWS personal computers).

Professor Bucciarelli has developed cT materials that provide a limited subset of GROWLTIGER's functionality. The striking difference is that GROWLTIGER required several person-years of faculty and programmer time (a level of expenditure neither Academic Computing Services nor academic departments currently can afford), whereas the cT-based subset required several weeks of Professor Bucciarelli's time (with substantial help at the outset from Academic Computing Services staff).

A very different use of computer tools in Mechanical Engineering involves ADINA and NEKTON, programs for finite-element and other mathematical analysis. Both programs are powerful, but learning to use them from scratch can be daunting. Moreover, ADINA and NEKTON run on the MITSF Cray X-MP, so that users must not only learn how to use the programs but also how to navigate between Athena and the Cray. Rather than require this of students, Professor Anthony Patera and his colleagues in 2.274 Computational Fluid Dynamics developed a set of templates to mediate between students and the Cray programs. Students could use Athena to specify parameters and observe results in terms familiar from lectures and texts, with calculations carried out efficiently on the Cray in the background.

Professor Patera, who served on the faculty committee that evaluated MIT academic computing in 1989-90 and who is also co-Director of MITSF, is active in an Institute-wide effort to explore options for advanced visualization and multimedia. Some Athena facilities are being used for this exploration.

Beyond these examples, about 20 other Mechanical Engineering subjects use Athena courseware and tool applications to teach topics including

- systems dynamics, design, and control;
- fluid dynamics and materials behavior;
- thermodynamics and heat transfer; and
- design for manufacturing.

### Facilities & Staff

Mechanical Engineering has two substantial Athena departmental clusters available to students, and one smaller cluster. In one of the larger Mechanical Engineering clusters the department plans to add DOS personal computers, since a faculty member wishes to use them for instruction. The DOS machines will replace obsolete Athena workstations long used by Professor William Durfee.

This illustrates one of the dilemmas both Academic Computing Services and departments face: What lifetime should we assume for computers? How should we make replacement decisions, given the sometimes transitory nature of faculty commitment and instructional preferences?

Mechanical Engineering employs a half-time professional to manage its computer facilities and to assist faculty with technical implementation. The professional involved, Steve Ellis, works for Aeronautics and Astronautics in a similar capacity. He also works for Academic Computing Services providing technical support for certain mathematical applications and libraries and for most FORTRAN work on Athena. Having one individual serve all these different functions creates interesting and productive links across departmental lines.

## 3 MATERIALS SCIENCE & ENGINEERING

### Subjects

One member of the Materials Science and Engineering faculty, Professor Augustus Witt, long has used Athena to promote communication among his students and teaching assistants, to make handouts and other curriculum materials available, and to provide some simple analytic and modeling tools for students to use. There has been little use of Athena or other educational computing outside 3.091 Introduction to Solid-State Chemistry (Professor Witt's subject), 3.13 Structure of Materials, and 3.185 Transport Phenomena in Materials Engineering.

Until recently, that is. Several members of the Department, including Professor Gerbrand Ceder, Professor Kirk Kolenbrander, Dr. David Ragone, and several other members of the Department's instructional faculty, began thinking in an organized way about educational computing. Their discussions led to several proposals for curricular innovation and change. The curricular proposals integrated various computer tools into teaching, especially molecular modeling and various analytic procedures. Some of these would work effectively on Athena; others won't.

The group first secured departmental approval of its plans, and then the financial backing of the department Head, Professor Merton Flemings, for some computer facilities. They approached Academic Computing Services, seeking collaboration and an Athena base for much of the work. Academic Computing Services agreed to provide equipment for a small Athena cluster in the department the fall of 1993.

Professor Bernhardt Wuensch served on the faculty committee that evaluated MIT academic computing in 1989-90.

### Facilities & Staff

When we finish deploying Athena equipment to Materials Science, the new cluster will have four workstations and a printer. In addition, the Department is seeking additional workstations with different capabilities for the cluster, which should double the total number of workstations. A few personal computers will complete the facility.

Materials Science & Engineering plans to hire a part-time professional (or perhaps a graduate student) to manage its educational-computing facility and to support faculty using it.

## 6 ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING & COMPUTER SCIENCE (EECS)

EECS is the largest department at MIT, with about a third of all undergraduates and a tenth of all faculty. This alone would make its use of educational computing complex and important. "Educational computing" in EECS means not only using computers as educational medium, but also as subject matter. These needs require somewhat different facilities. This makes the complexity and scope of EECS educational computing greater than that of other departments. EECS is highly integrated with several large research laboratories whose research facilities also serve education, including the Laboratory for Computer Science and the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

### Subjects

Computing-as-subject-matter dominates educational use of computers in EECS. Among subjects, the largest using educational computing in EECS, and probably in the Institute, is the innovative and pioneering 6.001 Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs developed by Professor Gerald Sussman and Professor Harold Abelson. Students use SCHEME, primarily in the subject's own computer clusters (although there is some Athena use), to understand guiding principles of programming. The Department views this understanding as fundamental to all electrical engineering and computer science. Almost half of MIT undergraduates take 6.001 at some point.

About 40 other EECS subjects make explicit use of Athena computing. Some, such as 6.021J Quantitative Physiology, use courseware developed at MIT (in this case the HODGKIN-HUXLEY software developed by Professor Thomas Weiss, which is an excellent example of computing as the medium of instruction, and won a national EDUCOM Software Award). Others use analytic tools such as MATLAB. Many of these subjects also use OLTA, course lockers, and other central network facilities. 6.013 Electromagnetic Fields and Energy has begun using cT in addition to MAPLE.

Professor James Bruce, Professor Michael Dertouzos, and Professor Weiss all served on the faculty committee that reviewed MIT academic computing in 1989-90. Professors Bruce and Dertouzos, along with many other faculty members, also participated actively in the series of committees and other groups that created Project Athena. Professor Harold Abelson and Professor Weiss are members of the faculty Academic Computing Council.

### Facilities & Staff

6.001 has its own clusters of Hewlett-Packard computers in building 38, about 44 workstations and 3 printers in all (with some currently awaiting replacement). The department has about 40 Athena workstations available for students in four major clusters and a few other locations. Many of the Athena workstations share cluster space with a large number of Hewlett-Packard workstations provided by the Department centrally for subjects other than 6.001. There a few other clusters of non-Athena workstations as well.

EECS employs a Director of Departmental Computing, Ed Moriarty, who also has been very active in various efforts to use computing in Science core subjects and to develop general, high-powered authoring tools for Athena. Moriarty manages the central EECS public computing facilities, including its local-area networks and servers but not the 6.001 labs or some faculty-managed facilities. A staff of 2 professionals and some student assistants works with Moriarty on facilities management, and on logistical support to EECS faculty. Additional staff support the 6.001 labs.

## 10 CHEMICAL ENGINEERING

###

### Subjects

Several Chemical Engineering subjects use general-purpose analytic tools available on Athena, such as MATLAB, MAPLE, and SAS. Among these are

- 10.37 Chemical Kinetics and Reactor Design,
- 10.71J Air Pollution Control,
- 10.28J Multivariable Control Systems I, and
- 10.940J Seminar on Pharmaceutical and Biotechnology Industry Management.

In addition, some subjects use tools more specific to chemical engineering, such as

- CHEMKIN and MOPAC for studying chemical reactions in 10.985 Seminar in Combustion Chemistry and
- ASPEN for studying polluted ground-water propagation in 10.491 Integrated Chemical Engineering III.

Chemical engineering increasingly requires students to understand the intricacies of molecular structure, especially for complex organic chemicals and other substances important in biotechnology. This calls for sophisticated simulation and visualization software. The department has been investing in equipment suitable for this software, especially Silicon Graphics workstations. It has been evaluating software and experimenting with ways to use Athena for these purposes (which may include upgrading IBM workstations that Academic Computing Services provides).

In addition to these computing-as-medium educational applications, Chemical Engineering teaches the large, popular 10.001 Introduction to Computer Methods. This C programming subject competes with 1.00 and 6.001 for students who want to learn some programming. 10.001 uses Athena extensively.

Professor Herbert Sawin (who also holds an appointment in EECS) served as a member of the faculty committee that evaluated MIT academic computing in 1989-90.

### Facilities & Staff

A major public Athena cluster occupies part of the basement in Chemical Engineering's building. In addition, the department operates a cluster with six Athena workstations and several Silicon Graphics and other workstations. How this cluster will grow, and whether it will evolve toward more or less Athena equipment, depends on the eventual compatibility between Athena equipment choices and the department's current explorations of visualization software.

The department employs a staff member to manage its Athena and non-Athena cluster and the computers distributed among faculty offices. Professor Gregory Rutledge takes special responsibility for computing in the Department.

## 13 OCEAN ENGINEERING

### Subjects

Ocean Engineering uses Athena in about 15 subjects, including two freshman seminars. As is the case in many other departments, some Athena use involves courseware, and some involves basic mathematical tools. The focus of Athena use follows the department's curriculum, balancing basic hydrodynamics and ocean science with ship design.

In addition to Athena facilities, the department operates several other workstations on which students can use software that will not run on Athena.

In an especially visible example of how research, service, and education overlap, Professor Jerome Milgram got involved in the hull design for the successful AMERICA3 effort to secure the America's Cup for the United States, California, San Diego, and Dennis Connor (not necessarily in that order, of course).

Ken Olsen, an avid sailor, loyal alumnus of the Institute, and founder of Digital Equipment Corporation, agreed to donate a Digital VAX- 9000 superminicomputer to MIT for the hull-design effort. Information Systems agreed to operate and maintain that machine (known as Patriot) within the academic-computing budget. Ocean Engineering used Patriot, and AMERICA3 won.[13]

### Facilities & Staff

Ocean Engineering locates most of its student-usable equipment in one large and one small cluster across the hall from one another. Together, the clusters contain about seven Athena workstations with a printer, plus a similar number of non-Athena workstations provided by the department.

There is also a cluster of Athena workstations at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), where many Ocean Engineering faculty and students spend time. The WHOI workstations are separately financed and managed.

The department employs a graduate student part time to oversee its computer facilities and to assist faculty with non-Athena software.

## 16 AERONAUTICS & ASTRONAUTICS

### Subjects

Aero/Astro was among the first departments to develop a large, crosscutting software suite for use across its subjects. With major support from Project Athena curriculum-development grants and departmental funds, a group of faculty members, graduate students, and programmers led by Professor Earll Murman (who would eventually head both Athena and his department, and who served as a member of the faculty committee that evaluated MIT academic computing in 1989-90) spent well over four years developing TÓDOR. This is collection of about 40 programs designed to do calculations and display simulations of aeronautical and astronautical phenomena including rocket re-entry and airfoil design. TÓDOR programs have consistent interfaces, provide numerous opportunities for simulated measurements such as might be undertaken in wind tunnels, and branch from a unifying front-end program.

TÓDOR has been very successful, permitting students to test a range of hypotheses that otherwise would have required wind-tunnel time or NASA support. The collection of programs won a national EDUCOM Software Award, and was the fertile spawning ground for many of Athena's most successful developers and faculty liaisons. Some programs in the TÓDOR suite were used in subjects outside Aero/Astro, especially to help students understand fluid flows.

Aero/Astro continues to use Athena extensively in subjects, yet TÓDOR is little used today. A partial explanation for this is commercial progress:

- simulations and analyses that once required ad hoc development à la TÓDOR can sometimes be carried out using standard analytic packages such as MATLAB and MAPLE, which are widely available on Athena.

But two additional explanations are less benign, as was the case for Civil Engineering and GROWLTIGER.

- The faculty members who brought TÓDOR into Aero/Astro subjects moved on (in this case, to the administration rather than the competition), and the new instructors sometimes chose to teach otherwise.
- As Athena moved on to new versions of UNIX and to new hardware, specific features of TÓDOR's programs (especially those involving displays) needed to be changed, which required programming time that neither Aero/Astro nor Academic Computing Services could supply.

### Facilities & Staff

Aero/Astro operates one Athena cluster with about ten workstations for student use, a pair of workstations for teaching assistants, and several workstations in faculty offices. The department also has non-Athena workstations, and uses Macintoshes extensively in research.

Steve Ellis, a research engineer, divides his time between coordinating departmental computing in Aero/Astro, doing the same in Mechanical Engineering, and providing expertise on mathematical software and FORTRAN to Academic Computing Services.

## 22 NUCLEAR ENGINEERING

### Subjects

Nuclear Engineering subjects use computers primarily as analytic tools. Students run mathematical applications such as MATLAB and write some programs in C and FORTRAN in, for example, 22.113 Nuclear and Atomic Collision Phenomena and 22.562 Advanced Biomedical Magnetic Resonance Seminar. At least one subject, 22.312 Engineering of Nuclear Reactors, uses more specific courseware.

### Facilities

Nuclear Engineering is housed in two separate locations, Building 24 and the MIT Reactor. Each location has a small, 5-workstation Athena cluster for student use. In addition, there are about six Athena workstations and a large number of DOS machines on faculty desks.

Nuclear Engineering operates its workstations without customization, and relies entirely on Athena staff for maintenance and operational oversight.

## ECSEL

The Engineering Coalition of Schools for Excellence in Education and Leadership (ECSEL) comprises seven colleges and universities that have joined together, with National Science Foundation funding, to explore ways of attracting and retaining more students in engineering. Some of ECSEL's work involves developing modules that can be used in different engineering and pre-engineering subjects at different colleges and universities. Some of these involve educational computing.

At MIT, for example, ECSEL helped

- Professor David Gordon Wilson and his colleagues to continue developing EDICS, a multimedia repository of basic mechanical-engineering data,
- Professor Einstein to continue developing GEOLOGY TUTOR,
- Professor Bucciarelli to continue developing materials for Mechanical Engineering and ISP subjects using cT,

and several other faculty to make similar progress.

# ROOM 2-032

Ever since Project Athena chose to emphasize UNIX workstations there has been a vocal and active group of faculty who preferred to use Macintoshes educationally, and a less vocal but perhaps larger group of faculty who preferred to use DOS machines. These individuals managed to develop facilities of their own, in some cases with grants and in other cases through their departments. MIT provided them little central support.

A few years ago Apple Computer donated several Macintosh computers to Project Athena as development platforms for a Macintosh-based Athena. The development project didn't work out, after about two years of development work (the Macs of that day weren't really powerful enough, and there were profound difference between Apple's and Athena's facility for login and access control), but the computers were here. We installed them in a small cluster for class use. As use of that facility grew, we began to reconsider public Macintosh facilities.

One major obstacle was the susceptibility of these machines to corruption. This problem has led other universities either to restrict or to staff their Macintosh facilities - neither being a promising solution for us, since we provide essentially unrestricted public facilities without staffing them. (This is one reason we can offer so much more academic computing to MIT faculty and students than other research universities offer to theirs, without spending more than they do.)

Working with others in IS, we identified software and developed operating procedures that would permit us to have an unattended, public Macintosh cluster. Productive collaboration ensued: the School of Science generously provided space for the Macintosh cluster, CRSP renovated it, and Information Systems bought furniture and new computers and other equipment. The result is 2-032, a well-equipped, networked Macintosh cluster available for scheduled classes or for public use by students.

Users of this new facility have included

- several freshman seminars,
- a few astronomy subjects in Earth and Planetary Science,
- some Biology subjects,
- some Physics classes in alternative freshman programs,

and assorted other classes. Within about a year the facility has gone from unknown to scarce resource. If the facility continues to prove manageable under load, then we may provide more Macintosh facilities in the future.

The upcoming completion of RESNET, which will provide network connections for dormitory residents and for fraternities and other independent living groups, will affect the need for Macintosh and DOS/WINDOWS facilities as well. We have begun to talk about other kinds of specialized facilities, ranging from public workspaces where faculty and students can plug in portable computers, to clusters with personal computers, to facilities with special computational, display, input, or interactive capabilities.

# SCHOOL OF SCIENCE

The School of Science is MIT's second largest by most measures. Although Science majors constitute about a fifth of undergraduate majors at MIT, the School teaches most of the Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, and Biology requirements that can occupy of an MIT undergraduate's first year. MIT's rapid climb to prominence among technological institutions of higher education is largely traceable to the Institute's judgment that superior engineering practice depends upon rigorous scientific preparation, a judgment that took form during the Karl Taylor Compton's presidency and resolved itself into curriculum following the Lewis Committee's report in 1949.[14]

## 5 CHEMISTRY

###

### Subjects

Graduate students in Chemistry use several applications on Silicon Graphics workstations. In addition, 5.33 Advanced Chemical Instrumentation uses several programs to analyze data and output results. We have worked with the Department to make Chemistry subject handouts available on line. The first major outcome of this collaboration will come when Professor Alan Davison and his colleagues teaching 5.11 Principles of Chemical Science begin using online handouts and other network services in the spring of 1994. The availability of FRAMEMAKER on Athena may finally spur this kind of activity during 1993-94.

Professor Jeffrey Steinfeld served on the faculty committee that evaluated MIT academic computing in 1989-90.

### Facilities

Chemistry operates a cluster of Silicon Graphics workstations primarily for graduate-student use, running several pieces of software to analyze molecules and reactions. It also has one Athena workstation located near its teaching-assistant offices.

## 7 BIOLOGY

### Subjects

Biology has used very little computing in its subjects historically, except for some limited use in

- 7.73 Human and Mouse Genetics,
- some network communications in 7.23 General Immunology, and
- some use of SAS in 7.89J Seminar on Pharmaceutical and Biotechnology Industry Management.

Professor Sheldon Penman has long explored ways to use Athena and other computing in his subjects, and campaigned tirelessly for widespread access to voluminous databases such as MEDLINE. Although he has identified some promising opportunities to use multimedia materials, these have not resulted in curricular applications as yet.

Last year a Biology freshman seminar used TIERRA, which simulates various genetic and evolutionary processes, and some other applications on Athena and Macintoshes. We have been working with the same instructor, Dr. Brian White, to help him use TIERRA and other courseware and to distribute class handouts in 7.012 Introductory Biology, one version of the new General Institute Requirement in biology.

Finally, Professor Vernon Ingram has used prize-winning Macintosh software called BIOQUEST to teach both in the Experimental Studies Group and in Biology proper,

Biology does not operate any Athena or other computing facilities for students. White has an Athena workstation, and also uses our Macintosh cluster.

## 8 PHYSICS

### Subjects

Professor Walter Lewin videotapes his lectures in 8.01 Physics I and 8.02 Physics II, and then broadcasts them on MIT Cable TV so that students may review material they missed.

Physics subjects informally use mathematical programs and communications tools on Athena. Some software has been developed for 8.284 Modern Astrophysics, but it has not yet seen much use. Physics instructors in several of the alternative freshman programs use computers in some of their teaching, especially in the Macintosh classroom.

Professor Edmund Bertschinger is a member of the faculty Academic Computing Council.

Physics does not have departmental computer facilities for undergraduate use.

## 9 BRAIN & COGNITIVE SCIENCE

### Subjects

Several subjects in Brain & Cognitive Science use Athena programs to analyze or simulate neural nets, including

- 9.39 Computational Laboratory in Cognitive Science,
- 9.62J Introduction to Cognitive Science, and
- 9.641 Connectionist Models of Cognitive Processes.

In addition,

- 9.S12 Motor Learning in Humans and Robots and 9.37 Computational Approaches to Motor Control encourage students to write programs on Athena simulating control processes.

### Facilities

Brain & Cognitive Science operates a small Athena cluster for student use, with six workstations.

## 12 EARTH & PLANETARY SCIENCE (EAPS)

### Subjects

EAPS subjects use both Athena and Macintosh facilities. 12.603 Solar System Dynamics uses courseware on Athena. 12.412 Advanced Astronomical Techniques, 12.400 The Solar System, and 12.410 Observational Techniques of Optical Astronomy use IMAGE REDUCTION AND ANALYSIS FACILITY (IRAF) software on Athena. Professor James Elliot has long been a proponent of sophisticated mathematical tools such as MAPLE and especially MATHEMATICA (which is an interesting and problematic case for us: software that is very powerful and popular, but too much more expensive than its competitors for us to have chosen it as our basic mathematical package). He served on the faculty committee that reviewed MIT academic computing in 1989-90.

### Facilities & Staff

Earth & Planetary Science operates a departmental computer facility with six Athena workstations, other UNIX workstations, and Macintoshes. Steve McDonald coordinates departmental computing for EAPS.

## 18 MATHEMATICS

### Subjects

Several subjects in Mathematics use Athena. Three of these serve many students in other majors: 18.03 Differential Equations, 18.04 Complex Variables with Applications, and 18.06 Linear Algebra.

- 18.04 uses specific tools to do graphical analysis of complex functions.
- 18.06 uses MATLAB.
- 18.440 Probability and Random Variables and 18.443 Statistics for Applications use SAS and other statistical software available on Athena.
- 18.330 Introduction to Numerical Analysis uses the NUMERICAL RECIPES set of subroutines.

The evolution of Athena use in 18.03 is interesting. This was one of the first subjects to use the LECTURE AUTHORING SYSTEM (LAS), Athena's first effort to create an authoring tool for faculty. Based on the LAS experience, Edward Moriarty from EECS (who had worked on LAS), John Haass from Mathematics, and several colleagues began developing a more general and easy-to-use COURSEWARE DEVELOPMENT SYSTEM (CDS). Developing CDS required more time and resources than were available, and it never reached a fully usable state. Meanwhile, the 18.03 teaching materials needed updating. Rather than stretch to maintain the now-obsolete LAS/CDS foundation, we worked with the faculty involved to re-develop the 18.03 materials using cT, the same software Professor Bucciarelli uses in 2.01. This proved efficient and successful.

Professor David Jerison serves on the faculty Academic Computing Council.

### Facilities

Mathematics operates a cluster of Sun workstations primarily for research, but undergraduate and graduate students also use them occasionally.