Craig A.D. Walters from the Department of Chemistry at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica made my day today. He is the first community member to contribute a module to the new Wonderland Module Warehouse. His module, called “Magnetic Susceptibility Measurements,” models something called the Gouy Magnetic Susceptibility setup. On the Project Wonderland at the Chemistry Department, UWI-Mona web site, Craig and his collaborators write, “In our teaching laboratory the Gouy experiment can take upwards of several hours to complete and with a class of over 100 students this is a major timetabling problem.”
Jonathan, Jordan, and I tried out the Wonderland version of the experiment and it took just a few minutes to run through the steps. We didn’t understand much about the chemistry involved, but we did get the gist of what was going on. Jon, of course, figured it all out first and used his telepointer to show Jordan and I how to step through the experiment and view the results. My one request for enhancement would be to network the application so that everyone in-world could see the experiment as it’s taking place.
It’s exciting to see Wonderland being used to teach real science. Great contribution Craig!
We did think of allowing all the users to see what was going on, for demonstration purposes.
However in a laboratory setting where each person needs their own results, our assumption was that a qualified instructor or manual would be there to guide them through.