Developers: Marc Brown and Marc Najork

JCAT, Java-Based Collaborative Active Textbooks is a Java-based implementation of CAT. Cat is a web-based algorithm animation system. This project is well-suited for electronic classrooms since views of a running program can be viewed on numerous machines. There are 2 versions of JCAT. A non-collaborative version which requires Java 1.0, and a collaborative version which requires Java 1.1. You are also given the choice of Solo, Teacher or Student. If you choose the Solo option, you will be shown a non-collaborative animation that will work with and Java-capable browser. The Teacher and Student options, on the other hand, lead to collaborative animations that, for the time being, only work with HotJava.

This system was written in the late 1990's while the developers were at DEC SRC. It was presented as an attempt to create hyper-textbooks, and marks one of the earliest Java-based efforts to develop an AV authoring system. A number of AVs were created, some re-created from prior implementations within the Zeus system.

At this time, I do not know of a good source for the contents from this system. There is a little bit of documentation at WebWorks, but the main site I know that has a copy of JCAT materials is maintained by University of Oldenburg (http://www-cg-hci.informatik.uni-oldenburg.de/~da/iva/baer/start/start.html).

Here is an online presentation (slides from a talk given by Marc Bown): http://www.chezbrown.org/jcat. This copy of the presentation has the forward/back buttons in the top corners invisible. Another copy of the talk can be found at: http://www-cg-hci.informatik.uni-oldenburg.de/~da/iva/baer/show/slide01.html

Known JCAT AVs: