New technologies for teaching and education

The purpose of new technologies developed by Calerga is to let our clients focus on what's essential to them, taking care of accessory technical issues. This is especially important for teaching where allocated study time is limited.

Since its creation, Calerga has developed close and lasting collaborations with renowned universities, such as EPFL in Lausanne (Switzerland) and UNED in Madrid (Spain). With Sysquake, Calerga has pioneered interactive graphics. To put them in the hands of students in the simplest and most effective ways, Calerga has utilized different technologies, most of them already validated by thousands of students.

Sysquake Application Builder

Creation of royalty-free stand-alone applications. Sysquake Application Builder is bundled with Sysquake Pro. Applications it creates benefit from most of the capabilities of Sysquake, starting with interactive graphics. They can be distributed on CD or on Internet or intranet.

Sysquake Remote

HTTP server extension in a CGI or an Apache HTTPD module. Close to PHP in its functioning principle, but with the power of Sysquake. Graphics can be integrated in web pages very easily, with limited support for interactivity.

AJAX and websockets

To get the same “live” interactivity of Sysquake in a browser, several paths have been explored, following the adoption of new standards in web browsers. Sysquake can be split into two parts: the server handles computation and prepares the graphics, while the client, written in JavaScript in a web page, handles the display and the mouse. For communication, first attempts were based on AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, a series of HTTP requests) with adequate performance on fast intranets. Websockets allow much better performance by keeping a single connection open and avoiding reconnection latency.

Sysquake in JavaScript

To avoid completely the slowness caused by internet communication, the next logical step is to put the whole program in the browser. A total rewrite of Sysquake in JavaScript began in 2013. The result can be used in several ways: with a command-line prompt which gives to the student the complete control on the sequence of computation steps she wants to carry out, in interactive graphics based on the same “SQ files” (Sysquake programs) as in the standard Sysquake itself, or in EPUB3 e-books.

Our JavaScript know-how also includes virtual reality based on WebGL with Calerga VR, the reading of many file formats, and node.js for server-side development.

MOOCS and future learning infrastructures present new challenges. We'll be glad to address them with you. For instance, we've acquired a thorough knowledge of the LTI standard, an extension architecture supported by many learning platforms. We've developed and deployed a solution which integrates applications written with Sysquake in JavaScript and the remote lab experiments of our customer in an edX mooc.

You're interested by our know-how, our extensive experience and the technologies we've developed? Please contact us!