Monthly Archives: March 2018

25th anniversary of Reactor Lab this month!

Interactive Learning, Reactor Lab history, Software Development

Reactor Lab is a pioneer in developing interactive simulations for active learning. This is a screenshot of an experiment in the Lab in March 1993 – 25 years ago this month. The Lab was a single HyperCard stack. Click on the image to see a larger version.

RL_March_1993

Here is the same experiment in today’s desktop Reactor Lab.

RL_now

A brief history of the development of Reactor Lab through 2006 is available at LiveCode Journal (hit browser back button to return here). The article refers to Revolution, which was LiveCode’s previous name. LiveCode is the development tool used to build the desktop version of ReactorLab.

Where are you?

Web Site

As long as we were teaching, we knew our notes and software were being used by our students. Now that we have retired, we have to analyze our web logs to see who is using the site and software. We are in the process of writing LiveCode scripts to scan through our logs and do some analysis. Here are some preliminary results for the month of February, 2018.

The first objective was to try to purge the logs of all web bots, spiders and crawlers. We were left with 20% of the original lines in the logs. I suspect that the bots/spiders/crawlers are indexing the PDF files in the RESOURCES section, which allows many users to find them in searches. Good in some aspects, but many users might not explore the rest of the site. All the RESOURCES content may be the reason that a search for “ReactorLab” or “Reactor Lab” puts our site at the top of page 1.

We were left with 3200 unique visitors after the purge, or simply “visitors” henceforth (unique IP addresses). This number roughly agrees with the Visitor Maps results in the NOW section. These visitors were from 107 different countries. The top five countries with the most activity were the US, India, Philippines, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom.

Of those 3200 total unique visitors, 2300 visitors from 96 countries used pages in the RESOURCES section of the site: 370 from 56 countries used the Matlab section, 1100 from 74 countries used the undergrad CRE Notes section, and 530 visitors from 66 countries used the Grad CRE section.

There were 59 visitors who downloaded the desktop software, and 86 visitors who ran the desktop software AND went “online.” There were six users of the Web Labs. Again, these numbers are for the month of February, 2018.

So far, I am pleased with what I am finding. I would be delighted to hear directly from you via email to   . Thanks.

A design example

Design

We are interested in the general topic of “design.” In the desktop Reactor Lab, we started out with each new lab looking differently than the previous one. We also observed that students are interested in moving through an assignment quickly, and that this would be aided by designing a consistent layout that could be applied to most labs: input on the left, process in the center, output on the right. Once you learn how to navigate your first lab, you can use that knowledge to navigate the others.

We were lucky to go skiing recently and stay in an old lodge. During the night, we got too hot. I remembered a thermostat on the wall. With the lights off and the room dark, I adjusted the slider on the side of the thermostat to a lower position in order to lower the temperature in the room. Below is a photo of the thermostat taken the next morning. What do you think happened?

thermostat

We ended up cooking on top of the bed with the blankets off, even though the outside temperature was well below freezing! I had assumed that a lower temperature setting would mean sliding the control lower. Wrong! The more I tried to cool the room, the hotter it got.

What was the maker of the thermostat thinking? Maybe that Hell is down and hot, and clouds are up and cool? 😛

Design is not just nice to have. It is critical. Every time I hear about a disaster being blamed on “operator error,” I have a strong suspicion that the poor operators were trying to do their job – assuming they weren’t looking at their phones – but were more likely confused trying to operate a poorly designed system.

We recommend reading Don Norman’s recent post about the Hawaii false missile alarm, see especially the link to a photo of the operator’s software menu, and Norman’s book “The Design of Everyday Things.”