Many publishers are now providing CD's with interactive exercises and animations with their textbooks. The idea being that some dynamic processes are better understood if the student interacts or can see "things" happen. Presumably, students are actively using these supplements to better comprehend certain concepts. How then to incorporate these supplemental features into the lecture?

With a little bit of experimentation I developed the following procedure to create dynamic lecture notes that can be used via a portable computer and projection device in the classroom and be made available to students on the web.

Minimum hardware required is a computer with an operating system that can multitask.

Obviously the faster the computer is the better the rendition will be. I've been doing most of my development on a 133 MHz Pentium running Window NT.

A lot of the animations that are available are quicktime MOV format. What is desired are selections from these animations in GIF89A format. I've found that the Hypercam software does a good job capturing AVI files from basically anything being displayed on the screen. Once the AVI file is made I've found that the Ulead GIF Animator 2 does a good job converting AVI to GIF89A files. So far these two products appear to be the most efficient way to incorporarate snippets of animations into html documents. One limitation to these GIF89A's is that the capture process works best with 8 bit color so there can be some loss of color resolution depending on the orginal source. Another limitation is the speed at which the GIF's load and execute. Limiting the number of GIF's per page seems to be the best way to get around that given the current hardware speed.

Let me know if anyone has any better ideas on how to generate these dynamic lecture notes.

NOTE to BMZ116 SUDENTS: Let me know if you have problems with these notes. Also I'm interested in whether they're helpful to you in your endeavors to learn this material.