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Session 8 - Teaching Projects.
Display session, Monday, June 09
South Main Hall,
Improvements in personal computer operating systems and hardware now makes it possible to run research grade Fortran simulations on student computers. Unfortunately, many legacy applications do not have a graphical user interface and are sometimes hard coded to a specific problem making them unsuitable for beginning students. A good way to repurpose such legacy code for undergraduate teaching is to build a graphical front end using a Rapid Application Development, RAD, tool that starts the simulation as a separate thread. This technique is being used with Virginia Hydrodynamics One, VH1, to provide an introduction to computational hydrodynamics. Standard test problems including gravitational collapse of an interstellar cloud, radiation cooling, and formation of shocks are demonstrated using this on Microsoft Windows 95/NT.
