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Educational software and TeXmacs |
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1.Dr. Geo
Dr. Geo is a Gnome free software created both for the interactive
study of Euclidean geometry and for a mild introduction to Guile/Scheme programming.
Using Dr. Geo, you can draw many
classical geometric contructions and explore their propperties
either from the metric point of view (measuring angles and length)
or from the transformation one (via plane trasformations). Each
Dr. Geo figure comes with a logic
tree which shows all steps towards its construction. The basic
geometric constructions provided by the software can be extended by
the user adding macro-constructions.
Dr. Geo also offers the
possibility to learn Guile/Scheme
programming at a very introductory level. With Guile
scripts it is easy to interact with the geometric apparatus by
implementing, for example, several formulas. In the latest releases,
Dr. Geo has been improved on the
programming side since it can evaluate entire files written in
Scheme. In this way the user can take
advantage from the typical structures of a high level language, like
recursive ones for example, to create new kinds of figures.
In Dr. Geo there are many
utilities available to the teacher: customization and locking of the
user interface, integration in Dr.
Geo of a simple text editor, possibility to export figures
(LaTeX, Postscript and PNG), etc.
Currently, a project is in progress to have a TeXmacs plugin for
Dr. Geo. In this way it will be
possible to use TeXmacs as front-end interface for Dr.
Geo and integrate directly all the geometric figures into
scientific documents.
© 1999–2003 Joris van der Hoeven