povray

Persistence of vision raytracer (3D renderer)

POV-Ray is a full-featured ray tracer. Ray tracers simulate objects and light sources of the real world to calculate photorealistic, computer generated images. Because of the nature of ray tracing, this process is quite CPU-intensive, at the benefit of more realistic images compared to real time rendering techniques. For example, in POV-Ray, you can model a glass prism, and you will see a spectrum in the resulting image. POV-Ray by itself is a command-line utility that will take scene descriptions, written in a special easy-to-understand language, to produce ray-traced images (or even a sequence of images, for animations). You can either write those scene-descriptions by hand, or use external tools to generate (parts of) the scene. povray-includes is highly recommended in addition to this package.

wims

server for educational content: courses, exercises, and exams

The WWW Interactive Multipurpose Server is an educational platform originally developed for mathematics but now also supporting subjects such as physics, chemistry, biology, and languages. WIMS features a rich set of resources and exercises either for autodidactical use or for training classes, including: * exercises with automatic feedback and correction, allowing the learners to work at their own pace; * interactive exercises with randomly assigned data, allowing the learners to work on the same type of exercise but with different data and as often as they wish; * exercises with an automatic scoring system, which enhances learner motivation; * user-friendly graphics and calculation tools; * courses and documents with hyperlinks to the exercise pool; examples in the courses can be made random, so the student can get more than one instance of an illustration for tricky concepts; * support for exams with pre-published contents. As each individual exam will have randomly chosen data, training is possible but writing each response in advance is not. This package contains the WIMS FastCGI server, serving Open Exercise Format (OEF) documents. OEF is a very high-level language which allows authors to focus on pedagogical issues.