Educational Software Discussion

             NOTES OF A DISCUSSION MEETING HELD IN CARDIFF 

               during the BCA Annual meeting Easter 1995



 During the Poster Session at the Annual meeting in Cardiff a discussion

meeting was held amongst interested members.



  The main points emerging were:



 (i)In addition to programs to teach the fundamentals of crystallography

    to undergraduates, there is a need to teach graduate students the 

    pitfalls of using large complex data analysis packages. This might be

    done by simulating a session using an actual refinement program.

    These days few students are involved in the programming of such packages,

    and since they do not fully understand the inner workings, they can make

    absurd mistakes in trying to use them, and as a result deduce completely

    wrong crystal structures.

 

    We recognised that it would be difficult to find computing resources to

    run the refinement proogram itself, this might take too long during a

    student laboratory period, but a set of likely 'poor choices' could be

    simulated and the resulting errors explained. 

   

    Several academics promised to forward the 'scripts' of their exercises 

    to the authors who would try to suggest how they might be converted to 

    a packaged program for wider use.



  (ii)The IUCr published a set of cheap teaching booklets for students some

    years ago, but these are now a little 'dated' and we should approach the

    IUCr teaching commission to provide access to cheap software for student

    use, and provide an index to such software available over the World Wide

    Web.



  (iii)We should continue to maintain a list of teaching software, and any

    special projects such as the CTI, and TLTP refereed to above, and

    publish it periodically in 'Crystallography News'



  (iv)We should try to persuade HENSA,(the Higher Education Software Archive)

     to add 'Crystallography' as a topic to their subject index, give it

     pointers to suitable software already in their archive, and encourage

     authors of exisiting software to deposit their programs in HENSA, 

     to make them more widely available.



Following the meeting, there were demonstrations of public domain software

on PCs and macs; we will try to organise a similar 'Swap Shop' at next

year's annual meeting and possibly extend it to include ideas on teaching

materials and a corner where people with textbooks or journals they no

longer need can offer them cheaply to others.