Robert Lucas Email and Phone Number

Developing and marketing educational software.

I led the Developing and Testing Systems course for second year degree. I previously led the Designing and Using Databases second year course.

Upto July 2010 I was with the PiCETL and then working on S288 and PIRATE. I pioneered 3d applications in Science. One of my first applications isa 3-D rendering of a celestial sphere. This plots up to 30,000 stars and the planets as the ancients regarded them. It is possible to fly through the surface of the sphere for the usual view of the heavens. This creates a stunningly beautiful animation. This was featured on the Sky at Night cover-disk in July 2008 and can be downloaded from http://www8.open.ac.uk/opencetl/resources/picetl-resources/celestial-e-sphere. I went on to design and implement the first 3d immersive application to be used on a Physics course. This was a simulator of the Meade telescope system that allowed the students to practice aligning the telescope mount before using the real thing.I also showed how 3d could be used to overcome the inherent difficulties in the Interactive Screen Experiments (ISE) approach which use photographs from actual experiments to present an interactive movie. As much as this seems like a good idea, it is flawed as multiple degrees of freedom in an experiment leads to a combinatorial explosion of needed photographs. Embedding the photographs of the important parts of an experiment into a 3d environment mitigates this problem substantially (See GIREP paper cited herein). I also did the programming that made the PIRATE system accessible remotely using a combination of off-the-shelf applications and bespoke software. I designed and implemented an emulator for the PIRATE system that used information from the actual system to drive the emulation (position of telescope, images taken etc.) Unfortunately this work was not finished.

Lecturing to final year and MSc on Logic and Databases.