John Waiveris
john@invisiblegold.com - (860) 285-0172

Harper Collins Studio Calculus Demo

Harper Collins had signed a contract with a prominent RPI math teacher to publish a calculus text book. The text book emphasized the use of computers and required a CDROM to be developed. I spent several months poring over the content with the professor to create a 250 page comprehensive design document. To accompany the document I worked to create three different examples of what the final multimedia presentation would look like. These three images show different user interface options each with a different level of complexity. The 3d interface (shown above) has buttons along the bottom that highlight when the mouse passes over them and push in when the mouse is clicked. It also has graphical effects such as blurring the screen sideways to give the feeling of pages sliding away one direction or another, and a 3d page flip when switching between the main menu and individual chapters.

We eventually signed a contract to develop the content over a two year schedule. I helped the people that actually created the final content. This is where my real involvement ended.



Highlights of this project involve integration with a math engine called mathedge. As students are learning to use Maple (a math tool) they can drag equations from the text down to the maple window and have it automatically entered in Maple's chosen syntax.


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This was the proof of concept for an ongoing multimedia project for the Harper Collins Puplishing company (later purchased by Addison Wesly) It is a multimedia trip through the world of Calculus based on content written by Joe Ecker of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. We took several months to go through his three semesters of content and designed interactive sections and combined it with v