[seul-edu] chemistry app (Re: Packaging apps for inclusion with distros)

[Georges Khaznadar <georgesk@boltz.univ-littoral.fr>]

Doug Loss writes:
 > So, what applications do you think should be packaged for inclusion
 > in a distribution targetted at schools?  

I should advocate for gperiodic. It can be useful as an approach to the
periodic table of elements. My last version, at
ftp://boltz.univ-littoral.fr/pub/gperiodic/
features gluing html pages other the web to any particular chemical.

It enables the following educational approaches, based upon
questioning, and information collecting : 1/ examining properties of
extreme chemicals and their applications, 2/ thinking of the history of
chemistry, from the stone age up to now, 3/ exploring a variety of
chemicals related to uranium. 

1/ Use the temperature scale colorization, to determine which simple
chemical are the most difficult to melt, and grab informations about
their use, their discovery and their elaboration.

2/ Launch gperiodic in a variety of linguistic contexts, with the
command :
    for l in en fr de nl es pl pt; do sh -c "LANG=$l gperiodic&"; done
it spawns seven gperiodic windows, each localized for a different
language. (See a screenshot at
ftp://boltz.univ-littoral.fr/pub/gperiodic/gperiodic-lang.png) 
Then compare the name of some simple chemicals, like Fe, C, Cu, Au, on 
one hand, Al, Zr, W, U on the other hand.
Observe that the first elements are known from prehistoric times, and
the others have been discovered rather recently. Can you explain the
variety of names, or their uniformity ?


3/ Let's consider the U element (uranium). Add a web page to this
element, containing several links to web pages, each with a short
comment. The topics are : extraction, elaboration, usage of uranium,
the list of elements which can be derived from uranium by the means of 
natural radioactive decay or by the fission reaction.

     ===========================

Just a point to fix : Kyle has my patches updated in May 2000 and
July 2000, but the cvs logfile at seul.org shows no changes in the year
2000, and the last snapshot seems to be updated at 17-May-2000


Georges