News from TMP - 3 May 1995
--------------------------

Dear All, 

Here are some items of news for the MARCH-APRIL period. This mailing
list has been compiled from people making direct enquiries to TMP, and
from email addresses left in the FTP logfile; if you don't wish to
receive any further mailings, please let me know [p.kent@ic.ac.uk].
Previous newletters are stored at 
 <gopher://othello.ma.ic.ac.uk/11/project/Docs/newsletters/>.


NEW MONEY:
The very good news is that we have obtained funding from Imperial
College, our host institution, to continue and expand our work for a
further 4 years, 1996-99. Details will be announced later.


VISIT TO THE USA:
I am pleased to announce that Wolfram Research Inc. have awarded me
one of their Visiting Scholar Grants to visit their HQ in Champaign
Illinois for four weeks, 15 May - 11 June. During this time I am also
interested to visit nearby places where Mathematica and similar
systems are being used in teaching. In addition, I will be taking some
vacation during the second part of June in San Francisco/Los Angeles
and New York/Wash. DC, so I could also make visits in those areas. If
you are interested, please let me know and we can try to arrange
something.


EVALUATION REPORT:
The Evaluation Report, prepared by Dr Richard Noss of the Institute of
Education (University of London), which analyses the outcomes of our
major trials in Autumn '94, is nearing completion and will be
accessible online late next month.


DOWNLOAD AND INSTALLATION INFORMATION:
We have been remiss in the amount and quality of information we
provide on how to download and install (and, even, use) TMP materials.
We plan to fix that in the near future - this page
 http://othello.ma.ic.ac.uk/DownloadGuide.html
will be the primary reference point.


INPUTBOX VERSION 2.0 FOR MS-WINDOWS:
Version 2.0 of the inputbox program for MS-Windows is now ready, see

  project/DialogBox/inputbox2.0/Windows

for the .EXE file and the source code (which is a MS Visual C++ v1.5 
project). See the last newsletter (
<gopher://othello.ma.ic.ac.uk/00/project/Docs/newsletters/News-92-02.txt>
) for information about inputbox version 2.0 .


INPUTBOX FOR X-WINDOWS (MOTIF):
Work is under way on a Motif version of the inputbox program, rather
than the current one based on XToolkit and Athena widgets, which only
works on SG Irix (but, conversely, the Motif version doesn't work for
SG Irix v4 which is my primary platform). 

OK, the real meaning of all that technical stuff is that versions of
inputbox will be available to work on DEC, IBM RS, Sun (probably) and
Hewlett-Packard (probably, will take longer) systems. Check out 
 <gopher://othello.ma.ic.ac.uk/00/README-UPDATE>
around the middle of next week.


FEEDBACK:
We appreciate very much all comments and suggestions about our
materials, be they good or bad, superficial or profound. If you do
download and look at our stuff, please spend a few minutes collecting
your thoughts, pressing computer keys, and sending the result to us
(tranmath-proj@ic.ac.uk). It is important for us to be able to show
our paymasters that we do have some "customers" out there.


OUR ADDRESSES
-------------
Phillip Kent, Phil Ramsden and John Wood,
Transitional Mathematics Project,
Mathematics Department,
Imperial College,
London SW7 2BZ.

Tel: +44 (0)171 594 8503, Fax: +44 (0)171 594 8517.
E-mail: tranmath-proj@ic.ac.uk .

Gopher and FTP to: othello.ma.ic.ac.uk (155.198.192.26).

World-Wide-Web at URL http://othello.ma.ic.ac.uk/ .

Please send *technical* questions about WWW/gopher/ftp and 
the TMP software direct to p.kent@ic.ac.uk .