The Astronomy Workshop: Enhanced Tools "scientific Notation" And "solar System Visualizer"

The Astronomy Workshop (http://janus.astro.umd.edu) is a collection of interactive World Wide Web tools that were developed under the direction of Doug Hamilton for use in undergraduate classes and by the general public. The philosophy of the site is to foster student interest in astronomy by using their fascination with computers and the internet. We are upgrading the "Scientific Notation" tool; its initial function was to enable the practice of changing decimal numbers into scientific notation numbers. This tool is very popular, with 10,000 hits per day typically. The upgrades include multiplication and division and the implementation of automatically-graded quizzes. We have also added a new tool, the "Solar System Visualizer", which animates orbits of the solar system's planets, moons, and rings to the correct scale (including retrograde motions), as well as displaying the orbits of a number of extrasolar systems to scale. We are gradually adding instructor materials and student activities to enhance the instructional use of the web tools.