School: Clasical High School
Teacher: Adam Blumenthal
Audience: Grades 9-12
Project: The Multimedia Lab at Classical HS (CHS) currently has four machines which access the Internet via a dial-up connection. Within the next few months we will be installing a full-time, high-speed (384K) connection to the building with each machine in the Lab sitting on a 100-Base-T Ethernet Network, and going out to the Internet through an NT proxy server. The project is to develop a visually enticing, media rich, Internet primer/tutorial which includes metaphoric representations of Internet concepts, practices, networking, etc. I imagine an interactive, navigable, 3D space consisting of a universe of nodes and links representing such technologies as the WWW, Telnet, FTP, AOL, a web page, a browser, a search engine, etc. Each of these elements is represented within the metaphoric univere that we create; selection of topics takes the user on a brief fly-through animation to a section of the symbolic universe where the concept is represented and explained. There should be a "tour" mode, a serach mode, a browse mode, etc. Examples of what CHS wants users to understand include: What is the Internet? What does the global network look like (symbolically)?; How does AOL (or ISPs in general) relate to, link to, differ from The Internet?; What happens when I click send in my email client?; What is a file download, and how does it work?; and how is a Web page set up and how is it accessed? Blumenthal writes: "The Internet is a confusing, abstract concept to most users at my school, and in general. I'd like to bring the Internet down to Earth, and make it a tangible entity." This software might be installed on all CHS computers, or served using the school's Intranet. Possible tools might be Hyperstudio, Authorware, or Java.