A CAI approach to a user oriented interactive plotting system: SURIPS (southern's user interactive plotting system)

This paper describes an interactive, FORTRAN based graphics system which enables a researcher or student, unfamiliar with programming languages or specialized graphics routines, to rapidly develop the skills necessary for graphic analysis by letting the user "bootstrap" himself on the system. SURIPS utilizes a modular design in both its program structure and its approach to establishing the level of expertise of the current user.The command language of SURIPS is an English like structure and has been used successfully in several numerical analysis and statistics classes at the University of Southern Mississippi. As the users understanding of the techniques involved improves, he is able to utilize the more advanced features of SURIPS while retaining the error detection capabilities of the system.