Senior Project - SLY

The IBM Personal Science Laboratory (PSL) is used extensively in college and high school labs to collect and analyze experimental data. PSL consists of a set of probes and software to display data measured by the probes. PSL probes can be used in experiments which monitor temperature, motion, pH, sound, photometric and radiometric data, and virtually any phenomenon that can be measured with fluctuations in voltage. However, the data screens, menus and analysis procedures are confusing to young children. The goal of this project was to develop a user interface to make PSL usable by elementary and middle school children. The system was developed using an object-oriented approach and implemented in C++. Classes include those for probes, data files, menus, data representation, and experiment description. An experiment description language provides a means for a non-technical administrator to describe experiments (which probes to use, how the results should be displayed, instructions for running the experiment, etc.), and the system will configure itself to run the experiment. The software runs on an IBM PS/2 under DOS.