With help from a Small Business Innovative Research grant from the Department of Energy, WhistleSoft is developing a series of multimedia tutorials to train people in accelerator physics and charged-particle beam dynamics. This is a discipline upon which a significant fraction of the nation's economy is based.

Important features of these tutorials are our On-Screen Laboratories,^® in which the student-user manipulates objects (e.g., moves a quad) to see how things work. Such interactive, self-paced treatments of this subject are not available elsewhere and this kind of learning experience cannot be achieved using a conventional textbook.

The content of the course consists of a series of tutorial modules that, altogether, would be roughly equivalent to a one-semester course at a university for upper undergraduates. We are targeting a broader audience, however, from technicians and lower undergraduates to graduate students and professionals concerned with accelerators.

An important feature of the tutorials is the ability of the student to choose to work at a comfortable level of detail. The three levels -- Introductory, Intermediate, and Advanced -- have different background colors to guide the user. Although the difficulty of the subject matter increases as one gets into the later modules, we have something accessible at the introductory level in every module.

• Tutorial modules already published (by Physics Academic Software) are:
  • Vectors began shipping in 1997.
  • Forces , began shipping in 1998.
  • Motion in Electromagnetic Fields began shipping in Fall, 1999.
  • Dipole Magnets began shipping in January 2000.
  • Quadrupole Magnets began shipping in June 2001.
• A paper given at the ED-MEDIA '99 Technology Conference in June 1999 gives details of this project's status as of that time.
• Contact us for more details.