"Internetworking" - demo version of interactive lesson, Flash, 270 K

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About the educational animation-based supplement to the authors’ textbook Computer Networks

The authors plan to have a new edition of their textbook Computer Networks to be published in English in 2004. We intend that all chapters of the new edition (please see the Table of Contents) will be illustrated by supplemental animation-based material, which, hopefully, should help teachers to explain, and students ton understand, the operation of most popular network protocols. This animation supplement will be created using the Flash technology.
The animation supplement will take the form of a series of interactive lessons. The interactivity means that in addition to the explanations and demonstrations given in each lesson, the user will be invited, in the dialogue mode, to answer self-test questions (with immediately available answers). Also, and more importantly, the user will be able to work with software built in those lessons that emulates various protocols. In particular, the user will be able to change the contents of frame and packet fields, assign values to certain parameters of the protocols, change values of router tables and commutators. Once those values have been changed by the user, the protocol emulator will emulate the behaviour of a real network in accordance with the changed parameters. This approach to learning protocols should enable students to study network technologies in action, to interfere into the operation of a network, to create deliberately interesting and complicated possible scenarios of the network behaviour, and thus to test their own ideas by conducting experiments. This all should make the learning process more exciting and creative.

While such interactive lessons may be used as independent training tools, they will definitely be more effective if a teacher refers to them as to tools/materials supplemental to his/her lectures and any recommended textbooks.

You may get some idea of what these tools are by viewing a demo version of a lesson on internetworking from the chapter “Introduction to IP Networks. This lesson talks about main principles of building a compound networks and functions of a network layer. Exercises to the topic “Ethernet Addressing” are based on the built-in emulator of Switched Ethernet.