September 23, 1999
LIBRARY / TEACHING TOOLS
Giving Students Serious Help With Science
STUDYWORKS SCIENCE
(Mathsoft; $29.95 for Windows 3.1 or
later, $39.95 for Macintosh 7.1 or
later.)
By HENRY FOUNTAIN
irst, some words about what
Studyworks Science is not. It's
not one of those ""edutainment""
programs starring a cartoon rodent
in a superhero costume who demonstrates 101 experiments that can be
done with stuff from the pantry or
illustrates the first law of thermodynamics by hotfooting his neighbor.
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Steve Northup
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No, Studyworks Science is serious
software, designed to help high
school and college students. It combines the power of a scientific calculator with the advantages of a computer, offering an unusual word-and-math processor, a resource library
and Web and newsgroup links on
physics, chemistry, earth science,
statistics and biology. (The latest
version of the program also treats
astronomy as a separate subject.)
Just as math lies at the heart of
much of science, so too is it the soul
of this program. That's not so surprising: Mathsoft, the developer, is
the company behind Mathcad, a
program used by engineers and others who crunch numbers for a living.
And Studyworks Science is itself a
companion of Studyworks Math, designed to help with everything from
algebra to calculus.
All that math in its pedigree
shows. Studyworks Science is often
at its best when dealing with numbers. It is less successful when it
delves into scientific concepts.
At the center of the program is the
worksheet. It's a blank screen, ready
for words and formulas. Studyworks
generally knows the difference between the two, though occasionally it
needs a little assistance.
For those who find a blank page
daunting, there's help in the form of
the Resource Center, a window that
contains the Web and newsgroup
links and, above all, the library. The
library is divided by subject, with a
special section for reference tables,
including an easy-to-use, annotated
periodic table.
So a student who has to write up an
experiment on the volume of gases,
say, can call up the Chemistry library, find a link for Avogadro's
principle and find both an explanation (it holds that equal volumes of
any gases at the same temperature
and pressure contain the same number of molecules) and formulas, including one for determining the
mass of a volume of one gas given
the mass of a volume of a second gas.
All well and good. But what makes
Studyworks really useful, particularly to the student who may not have
paid full attention in class, is that
both the principle and the formula
can be pasted into the worksheet. In
this way, the program makes it easy
to build a report that demonstrates
that the budding scientist really
knows the field, or at least makes it
seem that way.
The worksheet's math capabilities
are especially useful. Functions can
be defined and values changed at
will, and results in many cases are
calculated instantaneously. A math
palette provides an easy way to enter
symbols for square roots, differential equations and the like, and a
graphing palette offers the same
kinds of capabilities as a graphing
calculator.
The placement of formulas and
equations on the page, however, is
critical: those higher up get calculated first, and since one equation can
bear on another, sloppy presentation
can produce inaccurate results.
Neatness counts, even on the computer screen.
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Help for science
students with a
strong emphasis on numbers.
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The resource center's toolbar is a
bit like a Web browser's, with buttons for paging forward and backward within a subject, and a ""backtrack"" feature equivalent to a
browser's back button. There is also
a ""history"" button to make it easier,
say, to skip back to a page listing
Jupiter's mass from a page with a
formula for calculating escape velocity from a planet.
The library is most extensive in
math-heavy subjects like physics
and chemistry. The earth science
and biology sections are less exhaustive and some of the entries, particularly in biology, are so cursory as to
be of little value to a serious student.
They may, however, be of interest
to those for whom a little bit of
knowledge goes a long way (the student's parents, for example). To that
end, the library also contains ""made
simple"" entries that try to explain a
concept with easy-to-grasp examples.
The resource center also includes
a how-to section on the program's
basic features, and one on more advanced tips and techniques. There's
a lot to learn, although the company
says that students can figure out the
essentials in 20 minutes or so.
That may be true, but probably
only for the best students. Others
may take a lot longer, and there will
certainly be some students for whom
Studyworks, like science itself, is too
complicated.
And that raises a basic question
about the program's ultimate usefulness. The students who are most able
to make use of it probably need it the
least -- they know the formulas and
laws, or if they don't, they at least
know how to find them easily. Those
students who have difficulty coping
with science will probably find it
hard coping with Studyworks Science as well.