ISHTAR (Innovative Software for Higher-education Telematics Applications R. & d.) is a project under development at the Department of Physics of the University of Bologna.
The purpose of this work is to create interactive tools on the Web to
help students to learn some chapters of the physics course.
Initially the ISHTAR project had more ambitious goals, such as producing a
virtual laboratory, in a collaboration between the Physics Departments of
the Universities of Athens, Bologna, Florence and Lisbon.
The project starts with software package about the study of diffusion processes in solutions (Fig. 1 shows the starting page of the package), presented at the Third World Wide Web Conference, Darmstadt, 1995 [1].
The first software package was developed to make it possible for a student to follow in detail parts of the programme of a General Physics course and to obtain a working knowledge of specific arguments using a sort of virtual experiment.
The group working on the project includes people involved both in software-engineering and education. In this way we hope to build good software tools and also easily understandable interfaces for the students.
