There is obvious application of collaborative technologies to classroom situations. One simple scenario might have the teacher controlling all displays and passing control to a chosen student when required. For this, one requires applications that can act as either master or slave, and some method of token passing to establish the master at any given time. Statistical studies like Monte Carlo are ideal candidates for slightly more sophisticated collaborative systems involving combined data collection from a classroom of workstations. Imagine many groups running simulations in isolation, collecting data, and then performing statistical analysis. Each group could then submit data to a shared analysis package and perform analysis on data from the whole class. This would provide a wonderful illustration of the benefits of more data.
NPAC scientists are developing a collaborative system called `Tango' [11] which is integrated with a Web interface. The NPAC team has already demonstrated the ease of integrating existing applets into their collaborative framework by porting two simple physics applets into Tango.