graduate level courses taught in the Department of Agri- 
cultural Engineering at Purdue University. These 
courses are GIS and Watershed Systems Design (AGEN 
526) and GIS Applications (AGEN 591s). The NCGIA 
materials incorporated into Hyper-GIS were from the 
first two volumes. 
4.2 System Design 
We used HyperNeWS to design the Hyper-GIS system. 
HyperNeWS is a hybrid object-oriented tool in the sense 
that the basic object types are created with a classing 
mechanism similar to that of the Smalltalk software and 
the C++ language, but user-defined types are created 
from object templates or prototypes. We designed 
Hyper-GIS as a stack, consisting of a groups of cards. 
A HyperNeWS stack consists of one or more cards, con- 
ceptually stacked on top of one another so that only one 
card is visible at a time. Behind a card resided the back- 
ground, which belonged to one card or was shared 
among a number of cards in the stack. If a group of 
cards shared a graphic or a button, we only created it 
once and made it a shared background. Each card con- 
sisted of a number of objects. Currently, HyperNeWS 
supports six types of objects which can reside on a card, 
including buttons, menus, and textfields. According to 
the needs, objects were assigned to either a card, a back- 
ground, or the system stack itself. By attaching an object 
to the stack, we always saw the object no matter which 
card or background was currently being displayed. 
In order to make the feature of sound supportable in 
HyperNeWS, we programmed routines and interfaced 
them to HyperNeWS. Therefore, the enhanced Hyper- 
NeWS provided a variety of media, including text, 
graphics, images, sound (voice), and animation (motion 
pictures). A sound button was designed to control the 
volume of sound or turn off sound. Like other types of 
buttons, this button can be attached to stacks and cards. 
For example, the sound button is used to play the 
recorded water flowing through a gage while viewing 
the gage station. 
We designed key terms or topics of GIS materials in red 
color fonts, which referred to a hyper-link behind each 
red textfield. It was also called a hot key. This ability 
allows students to click on a red textfield and reach the 
definition or the details about the text. 
4.3 Hyper-GIS 
Main Menu and Global Buttons: The Hyper-GIS system 
is menu-driven (Figure 1). The textfields of Section 1, 
Section 2, Section 3, and Section 4 contain hot keys so 
that students are guided to each section of Hyper-GIS by 
clicking on these hot keys. For example, students are 
guided to Section 1, Introduction to GIS, by clicking on 
the hot key Section 1 (Figure 2). At the bottom of the 
menu, seven types of buttons were designed and 
attached to every text template. Button Done exits 
Hyper-GIS. Button top sends the current display to the 
main menu, as shown in Figure 1, no matter where the 
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previous display was located. Button previous sends the 
current display to a logically-previous object. Button 
next sends the current display to a logically-next object. 
Button up sends the current display to its parent-level 
menu. Button recent sends the current display to the 
object which happened most recently. Button index 
sends the current display to the index card. With the 
index button, students can search any term, section, or 
topic of interest and discover the corresponding details. 
Graphics, Images and Intuitive Display: Graphics and 
images played an important role in Hyper-GIS. Graphics 
usually consisted of images. Hyper-GIS provides an 
intuitive illustration to the GIS component (Figure 3). 
Images were incorporated to make this figure intuitive. 
From this figure, students can learn how a GIS layer was 
stored in a spatial database, what types of data a DBMS 
deals with, what kinds of output we can get, etc. In 
teaching GIS, concepts of Raster and Vector (Figure 4) 
are not easy to be explained, especially for those stu- 
dents with little background with computer graphics. 
Figure 4 including two images, intuitively shows Raster 
and Vector side by side, and the difference of Raster and 
Vector can be easily visualized by students. Students 
can also learn what spatial data look like through a spa- 
tial image shown in Figure 5. 
Hot Keys about Details: Hot keys take students to the 
details of the highlighted keys. For example, by clicking 
on the first hot key in Figure 6, students can get details 
about the maintenance and analysis of the spatial data 
(Figure 7). The hot keys can be added to or removed 
from Hyper-GIS based on requirements. 
Indices and Random Access: Whenever students want to 
learn and review terms and topics, they can click on the 
index button anywhere in Hyper-GIS and then be taken 
to the index section. Form the index, they can choose a 
pre-designed item of interest. Index searching was 
implemented with hot keys in the index section (Figure 
8). After the searching, students were sent back to the 
index card when clicking the GoGIS button. This sec- 
tion can also be updated based on requirements. 
Animation and Sound: With animation, natural scenes 
can be created on a computer. Sound can be used as an 
auxiliary feature to enhance the animation. In Hyper- 
GIS, we used animation and sound to create a scene of 
the flowing water through a gage (Figure 9). Pre- 
recorded sound of the flowing was simultaneously 
played. 
GIS Applications: As previously mentioned, three GIS 
applications describing watershed management models 
were incorporated to teach students each model and 
implementation of a GIS project. For example, Figure 
10 shows how Hyper-GIS demonstrates that a runoff 
spatial map can be obtained with the addition of a 
curve-number map and a rainfall map.