An object-oriented approach to educational software in building physics

摘要

An object-oriented building-physics software A.T.O.N. (which is the acronym for the German "General Thermal and Ecological Verifications") is described as an example for educational software written in APL. The software was developed at the Department for Structural Analysis at the Technical University of Graz, and has been successfully used for teaching building-physics. A.T.O.N. was designed in only four months. It comes with an user-friendly interface, which is easy and effortless to learn. Every manipulation of data is immediately monitored in graphical windows. In order to achieve this "question & answer"-concept a hybrid system was set up. This system consists of quick C- and Fortran-DLLs combined with the dyalogAPL™ interpreter using CausewayPro™ as an interactive development environment.