more coiling parameters

From
Date
Hi!
I am an undergraduate student at the University of British Columbia. This
summer I am working with Department of Earth and Ocean Sciences to create web 
sites and on-line interactive materials for its undergraduate Palaeontology 
courses. 

I am currently developing an interactive module intended to help undergraduate 
students visualize the coiling geometry of cephalopods. Our goal is to bring the 
coiling parameters of cephalopods to life.

We are planning to use any combination of CGI scripting, VRML and/or JAVA
to generate images of coiling cephalopods, with Raup's model as a starting
point for student exploration.
  
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There are many different possibilities of how we could develop our module:

The student could determine the geometry of the cephalopod by entering the values 
of the coiling parameters.  

It would also be instructive to allow the student to see the gradual transition 
that would occur as one parameter gradually increased or decreased.  

It could also be possible to have an option where the student could click on an 
image and have the cephalopod coil before the student's eyes.

At predetermined localities of particular geometries, there could be 
corresponding real-life images of fossil cephalopods.  This addition could be 
valuable to show the real-life interpretation of the coiling parameters.

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If anyone is interested in finding out more, or has any information that may help 
us in our efforts, we would love to hear from you.

Jessica Clark-Chant

jclark@eos.ubc.ca
Department of Earth and Ocean Sciences
University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C.