JERIC 2004 paper
The Slide Show Applet
Slide Shows
The slide show applet has a number of features that suit it to the tasks of teaching and learning. Try the slide show below to experience some of these features. We borrowed this slide show from a separate project underway in our laboratory to create a hypertextbook on biofilms. It should be clear from this example how the slide show applet can be used for the theory of computing.
Creating Slide Shows
Creating a new slide show is a straightforward process of four steps:
 | creating the digital images to be displayed |
| composing digital audio clips |
| combining the digital images and corresponding audio clips into a single file |
| configuring the parameters of the slide show applet to refer to the image names and corresponding audio clips for the desired slide show |
Digital images can be of arbitrarily high resolution. They are simply reformatted for presentation on standard low-resolution computer screens. However, the slide show allows a user to "zoom in" on any desired portion of an image. For zooming, the higher the resolution of the base image, the better the quality of the zoomed portion of the image will be.
Features
Among the features of the slide show applet are
| the capability to present graphical images, such as pictures and illustrations, in a slide show format |
| a provision for including narration or other audio with each image in the show |
| an option for presenting the slides automatically in sequence or - under user control - a slide at a time |
| the capacity to reverse the direction of the presentation |
| an index that allows the user to select an arbitrary slide at random for presentation |
| a "magnifying glass" option that allows the user to zoom in and out on selected portions of the image as far as desired. |
Uses
The slide show applet is ideal for various presentations in a hypertextbook. We list the following as examples for the theory of computing hypertextbook:
| step-by-step illustrations with voice narration of various processes, such as how to construct a finite state automaton to recognize a particular language, how to formulate a regular expression for a particular set, and so forth. A relatively large number of such shows can be designed to help students for whom a few lectures are not sufficient for learning the concepts. |
| a presentation of the history of the theory of computing with pictures and accompanying narration of the key players and their contributions. |
| a rogue's gallery of contributors to the hypertextbook. |
It is expected that the video and slide show applets will be used in many cases to describe processes that eventually will have associated active learning models. The creation of such interactive models takes considerable time; in the meantime, the slide show and video applets can be used to fill the gaps.
System Requirements
The slide show was written in Java using Java Media Frameworks from Sun Microsystems. In order to view slide shows in the hypertextbook one must have Java Media Frameworks and recent versions of the Java Runtime Environment and compatible browsers installed. Also, for reasons we are still trying to determine, the applet chokes occasionally when being run across the Internet, whereas it works fine when installed on a local hard drive or run from a CD or DVD (the way it is intended to be used).
Acknowledgements
The slide show applet was developed by Brad Pascoe.