Title  'Living in a Materials World '
Author & Publisher   The CCLRC, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory

This CD is freely available to secondary schools; it was published in 2003, funded by EPSRC and supported by the ISIS department of the CCLRC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) in southern Oxfordshire. It was developed in a collaboration between RAL scientists and local teachers to match the A-level physics course specifications. The CD is stored in a DVD sized box and comes with a note giving the password for the teacher. This allows access to the model answers to the questions as well as further web links, a curriculum audit and the text in an easily printed format. Visits to ISIS, the spallation neutron source used to study materials, can easily be arranged for local schools where students can see the accelerator and its facilities for themselves.  Students who live further away can get a very good idea of what ISIS looks like using the Virtual tour provided on this CD.

 There are sections on how particle accelerators work, as well as descriptions of the current research in physics, earth science, chemistry, engineering, biology and archaeology. There is also an introduction to interference, with animations illustrating constructive and destructive interference. This section goes on to explain Bragg's law. Hyperlinks to a glossary of terms are provided to define unfamiliar concepts and terms.

Another section, 'People at work', has video clips of ISIS employees talking about their work and the qualifications and experience needed to get their jobs. The people have a range of skills, they are mostly research scientists but technicians and secretarial staff are also included.

A historical section has photographs of early research workers in the field and a description of their discoveries. I noticed particularly that their clothing was very different from that of today's workers as seen in the video clips. Perhaps it was merely that the photographs were monochrome in the 1930s, certainly the people were more formally dressed, no jeans and Tee shirts in the lab then.  

More information about the CD is available on the ISIS web site at URL:

http://www.isis.rl.ac.uk/materialsworld/

where you can order a copy of the CD-ROM as well as see much of the Teacher Resources information on the CD itself, such as videos and animations from the Research Section, the people at Work video, the questions and answers for the sections and the full text from the CD-ROM in an easily printable
format.

Since so much of the information is on the web already, I wondered why the authors did not make the CD using HTML rather than using this very similar screen display seen in the image above. Each screen has a header describing the section at the top. On the right hand side of the screen three clickable icons give access to the glossary, the questions on this section and 'sound'. This is independent of the sound in the video clips of people talking about their work. Initially it is turned on, producing a synthetic drumming noise which personally I found irritating; luckily it is easily turned off. At the bottom of the screen four icons allow navigation through the CD, 'menu' allows you to jump to a different section, 'back', 'next' and 'quit CD' are self explanatory. The central area is divided into three, with two small regions on the left, the upper where the video clips are shown, the lower with 'postage stamp' sized versions of possible images for you to click on to see them in the upper area. The larger area on the right has descriptive text.

Further Information: No site licence is required to run multiple copies on a school network. For more information about the ISIS facility or the CD-ROM please contact:
Dr Martyn Bull or Dr Christopher Frost, ISIS Facility, CCLRC Rutherford Appleton laboratory, Chilton, Didcot, Oxon OX11 0QX
Tel: (01235) 445805

Computing Technicalities:
This CD was reviewed using a PC clone laptop, a Dell Inspiron 7500, with Windows 98 a 500MHz Pentium III processor with 64Mbytes memory and an LCD screen size 1024 x 768. I loaded and ran the CD with few problems, but it does need some familiarity with PCs and their packages. There is a brief introductory screen, but I should have liked to see a little more explanation;  for example, how to distinguish whether an underlined phrase links to the glossary or to the Internet, and that the 'questions' icon was only active when it changed to showing question marks.

The recommended minimum system  requirements are a PC with a Pentium II 300MHz, Microsoft Windows 95,98,NT, 2000 or XP, 43MB (64 recommended) 32xCD ROM drive, 16 bit colour display, 800 x 600 screen. A copy of QuickTime 5 is provided on the CD which will be loaded automatically unless you already have one.

They did not mention that the word processing package Microsoft Word is needed for the text of the questions and answers. Presumably any school with a PC will also have Word, but PCs for personal use can be bought just for games or with other, cheaper, word processing packages.

They did not explain that to access the external links you also needed a live Internet connection and a Web browser.  In these days of virus infections and spam many people only switch on their modem when they want to use the Internet. Schools may not allow their students unrestricted Internet access.

My laptop has a larger screen size that that suggested, so I saw the display surrounded by a white frame about 200 pixels wide, with a rather small area used for the video clips. If the authors had used HTML rather than this proprietory display package with a fixed screen size, the Web browser would have a display which filled the screen. The CD would have not only looked better but would have been accessible to any computer system not just PCs.

Conclusions: This CD is a very useful resource for schools, with easily accessible resources for teachers as well as showing students the wide range of research done at ISIS and a little particle physics. I particularly liked the way that the examples in the engineering section showed broken bicycle parts which students might have encountered. This would make them realize the importance of strain testing much better than showing them turbine blades.

Kate Crennell

1. This article published on page 12 issue 90 'Crystallography News' September 2004
2. Click here for short reviews from other periodicals.