VISITview Lesson Builder Tutorial

   5/30/99

This is a short tutorial on using the VISITview Lesson Builder Tool.  Please be sure you have looked over the overview  information before going any further.

Installation

If you've not already done so, please read the "installation information" to get the software installed.

After you have install the VISITview Lesson Builder, it's easy to start it. From within the directory you installed the visitpack.zip file, running the batch file:

               visitbuild

will bring up the primary screen.  If you've not seen it, here's a look at the various parts and controls.
 

Start with an existing lesson

In order to familiarize yourself with the VISITview Lesson Builder, it's easiest to load in an existing lesson.  The best example to start with is the buildexample.zip file . Just download the file and put it at some convenient place on your disk. Do NOT un-zip it!!
 

Learning the mechanics

  1. Click on the File menu, and select  Open Lesson

  2.  
  3. When the File Choice Dialog appears, select the file buildexample.zip

  4.  
  5. As the information is being read, notice the "progress bar" that appears in the lower left corner of the window

  6.  
  7. Once the lesson is loaded, you should experiment some with the buttons:

  8.  
  9. Return to the Page View by clicking on the View Pages button.

  10.  
  11. Return to the Page View by clicking on the View Pages button.  Now let's move a page.

  12.  
  13. Now, let's browse an image (hopefully you have some spare GIF or JPEG images on your disk!!!)

  14.  
    1. click on the Browse Directories button
    2. when the File Choice Dialog box appears, locate and select an image file
    3. Notice that it appears in the little window, and now a list of all other potential images appears in the List box next to it.
    4. Just for fun, select a Page in the lesson (by clicking on it's first frame), and then click the Insert button for browse images.

    5.  
  15. Do more experimenting

  16.  
  17. And more...

  18.  
  19. Finally, you're ready to save your lesson, so from the File Menu click on Save Lesson.  The File Choice Dialog that appears wants you to name a location and filename to save this "revised" lesson.

  20.  

What do you get?

When you Save the Lesson, the following files are written to the ZIP file: If you need to further edit any of the text files, you will have to extract them, edit, and re-zip them.  Over time, we should be able to identify what parameters need to be set in these files, and then provide an interface to do that.  Note that if you are using an existing lesson, and other HTML tags are in the viewmaster.html file, they will be included in the output.  Note also that the viewstudent.html file is created as an exact duplicate of the viewmaster.html except for the "Master" tag.
 
 

If you have any questions, please send email to


 

Return to VISITview home page.