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Interview With Kristin Henry, President of GalaxyGoo
Vera Fleischer, 11/18/2003 -
Meet the President of the Galaxy, Kristin Henry. If you haven’t heard of her, you will soon, with or without this article. She has uncanny amounts of drive and passion, most of which she invests in her non-profit organization GalaxyGoo.
Kristin and I met in the We're Here forums about a year and a half ago. Shortly thereafter I moved to her homebase of San Francisco, and we have been collaborating and meeting for Flash happy hours ever since. Last month, Scott Manning and I had a conversation with Kristin at the FlashKit conference, mostly about Math. Scott was left utterly confused and has asked me to probe a little further into Kristin’s brain and turn my findings into a more palatable form that even ordinary humans can understand. Below are the results of that endeavor. What is GalaxyGoo?
Basically, GalaxyGoo is an open think-tank and online community. We explore ways of communicating Math and Science with online technologies. We play with ideas, and share them. Folks contribute to projects when they have time. How and why do you use Flash at GalaxyGoo?
We use Flash for all kinds of things: straightforward science animation, interactive educational games, science simulations, and dynamic data display. I love Flash, because I can do almost anything with it. I can plug in data from almost anywhere, although the new cross-domain policy file requirement can complicate things. Flash enables creative visualization of this data, and quick modification of the user interface during production and post-production. Another reason we use Flash so much, is the international community of Flash developers. The quality of work developers donate to GalaxyGoo is quite remarkable. These are creative, smart, and generous people. What are your ultimate goals for GalaxyGoo?
World domination! Nah, just kidding. My ultimate goal is to open people’s minds to science and math--to have them discover that learning doesn’t have to be painful or boring. We’re trying to raise the bar on the quality of science animations and educational material online, and have fun at the same time. Right now, we’re completely web-based. A short-term goal is to start holding small meetings, where GalaxyGoo members can brainstorm in person. We’ve begun, in small gatherings, with the “Happy Hours.” You like Math, don’t you?
I’m just not afraid of it, anymore. I used to have math phobia and terrible test anxiety. My math classes were a series of mechanical drills, with very little understanding. It used to be something I suffered through, to fulfill requirements for other subjects. While studying for my second degree, I got lucky. I had great math teachers and small classes. I learned a lot, and gained confidence. By the time I got to Discrete Mathematics, I was actually having fun with math. What can you tell us about webMathematica?
I first encountered Mathematica in a Calculus course, and fell in love with it immediately. In fact, I got the student version for myself, so that I wouldn’t be limited to lab time with the program. For the first time, I didn’t have to worry about arithmetic while doing math homework. I could just play with the ideas… very liberating. Years later, I found out that they were coming out with webMathematica. I had to have it! I wrote to the company and asked to be on the beta, since I couldn’t wait for the public release. I’ve had a love-hate relationship with webMathematica ever since. WebMathematica is a set of Java servlets that allows access to the Mathematica kernel from a web interface. The first release was a challenge to work with, but the recent release is vastly improved and is more in line with web technologies. It’s based on JSP technology, and has better resource management on the server. We’re now upgrading to webMathematica 2.0 (a great improvement over 1.0), which should ease development considerably. What is the status of the Flash/webMathematica combination?
Our best known project is an interactive Periodic Table of Elements, which pulls data about each element from a Mathematica package. A few of us are also working on MathML readers for Flash. Since webMathematica can output in MathML format, this can become a powerful tool for communicating mathematics. The curveThrough project is pretty cool, I think. Basically, it’s a graphing application, where we take advantage of Mathematica’s power to simplify the data describing a curve, based on an equation. Server-side, Mathematica takes the equation and the range we’re looking at (say, from x=0 to x=30), determines the derivative of that equation and the min and max and points of inflection of the equation’s curve, and then returns the Bezier control point for the curve of that equation that would be drawn in Flash. To draw this curve in Flash by itself, the application would need to evaluate the equation at many points along the curve, but with webMathematica we can reduce the data points to 3 for a simple curve. The savings in computation really add up when you render a 3D graph of an equation, in Flash. If people want to find out more about webMathematica and Flash, where should they go?
To learn about webMathematica: wolfram.com. Unfortunately, the folks at Wolfram prefer Java applets and server side generated gifs for client-side solutions, so there is very little support for alternative solutions like Flash. We’ve been working on resources at GalaxyGoo, but it’s slow going. This is frontier work. You recently participated in the Blogathon. Can you tell us about that experience?
It was a blast! We posted a Flash experiment every 30 minutes for 24 hours, during the Blogathon event. Edwin, Mike, and Richard joined me on a special blog, Curiouser. By the night before the big day, we had all of our posts lined up and ready to publish. The rules of the Blogathon required us to publish the posts personally, every 30 minutes. I started the day at 6am, and Richard took over a couple shifts during the day so that I could take naps. Then, Edwin took over the last shift. By that time, I had a timer that went off every 30 minutes… to wake me up in case I fell asleep. Looking at what we did, I’m amazed and proud. We even won the award for “Best Visual Arts” of this year’s Blogathon.
How can members of the Flash community get involved at GalaxyGoo?
There are a lot of ways to get involved. A good way to get started is on our public discussion forums. We can always use good bug reports and suggestions. Mac users are always in demand for testing. If you decide to join GalaxyGoo, be sure to fill out your profile and describe your skills and interests. We’re a diverse group, and these profiles help us get to know each other. If a project interests you, ask to join the team. Come to our next Flash Happy Hour, if you’re in the San Francisco Bay Area. Look for the next announcement on our blog. ---------------------- Hopefully this gave you a small but elucidative glimpse into Kristin’s complex brain. Again, her site is at galaxygoo.org. Since GalaxyGoo is a nonprofit organization, support is always welcome.
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