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erly are exploited by the educator, they could create strong
motives to the student who will try to find out how this happens.
So the learning process takes a Bottom-Top-Bottom (BTB) approach
instead of a top to bottom which is the conventional way of teach
ing process. The course material so is organized as usual into
individual modules or sections and each section dealing with a
specific problem, then the BTB approach is applied to that section
as follows: The instructor demonstrates the solution of the prob
lem using a binary coded version of a program which has been writ
ten before by him or her and allows the students to have access of
execution only. The students can process real data and obtain pro
duction results. Then a lab exercise is given to the students to
write a computer program to do the same thing. The instructor may
provide the source code of several routines or may provide, with
certain restrictions, the source code listing of the entire pro
gram, so that the average student will finish the assignment
within the expected time limits. The lecture then covers the theo
retical aspects of the problem in an optimum algorithm form making
it easy for the students to understand because they are practicing
at the same time on how to implement the algorithm. The lecture
does not have to enter into a great depth of the theory leaving
that option to any interested student who wants to study further
from provided references. In this way there is an integrated learn
ing process of all components involved: theory (at any depth),
algorithm, software, hardware plus that the student is confident
of knowing the content of the study section. This learning process
was applied first during my nine year career at the Surveying
Engineering Program of the California State University, Fresno and
provided excellent results (Hatzopoulos J.N. 1985).
In the Department of Environmental Studies, of the University of
the Aegean, the same process is also applied for remote sensing
and GIS courses. There is a microcomputer laboratory with PC com
patible microcomputers having CGA and Hercules graphics cards.
This lab is used for both remote sensing lab assignments and GIS
lab assignments. Two examples one in remote sensing and one in GIS
of lab assignments are given bellow:
Remote Sensing Lab assignment 9. RADIOMETRIC ENHANCEMENT
A part of landsat image of channel 4 is composed of 90 lines by
150 columns and it is available in the file LAB9.DAT. Write a com
puter program to do the following:
1. Generate 10 gray scale shades by making a hyperpixel composed
of 3x3 = 9 single pixels of the PC-CGA graphics card which will be
worked in monochrome high resolution graphics mode.
2. Read the available file LAB9.DAT one line at a time and hold
in memory those values needed to create the regular histogram of
the digital image and the equalized histogram.
3. Create a menu within the program which allows the following
operations for radiometric enhancement and image display:
(a) Display regular histogram.