A TOOL TO LEARN AND TEACH CRYSTALLOGRAPHY: ABC (AN INTERACTIVE BOOK ON CRYSTALLOGRAPHY)

Cascarano G ¹, Giacovazzo C. ¹,Pifferi A.², Polidori G.³

¹ Istituto di Ricerca per lo Sviluppo di Metodologie Cristallografiche, CNR, Bari, Italy.
² Istituto di Strutturistica Chimica 'G.Giacomello', CNR, Roma, Italy.
³ Dipartimento di Scienze della Terra, Universita', Perugia, Italy.
E-mail: sir@unipg.it

Keyword: computer aided teaching

The large diffusion of personal computers and their continuous increasing in power has made feasible the idea of interactive computer-based books wich are able to exploit graphics to show in three dimensions what normal books can represent in two dimensions only.

Some time ago a project started to create an interactive electronic book useful for the teaching of crystallography following the guidelines of the first three chapters of the book "Fundamentals of Crystallography" edited by C.Giacovazzo, Oxford Press, 1992. In this electronic book a special attention is devoted to the general crystallography; thus symmetry, crystallographic computing and diffraction by crystals are the areas covered by the book.

Hypertext features like hot words and sensible areas allow the student to interact with the program. The text helps the student to understand the matter, the graphical counterpart shows the effects of the user decisions.

3D graphics helps the user to understand symmetry operators and their effects in the space, three dimensional lattices, structures layout, the most frequent crystallographic calculations, fourier transfoms, geometry of the diffraction etc.

Several practical examples are suggested, but the user can make his own exercises performing the described calculations on his data.