Description
The Earth's surface, a complex 3-dimensional form, is commonly represented by 2-dimensional topographic maps. Undergraduates at the freshman and sophomore levels have a difficult time in going from 2-dimensions to 3-dimensions, and have difficulty understanding, interpreting, and locating features on topographic maps. In order to aid them in visualizing landforms that are depicted on maps, I constructed a web-based tutorial using Macromedia Flash 4.0 and Metacreations Ray Dream 5.5. I chose Macromedia Flash 4.0 because it is vector based and, as a result, complex 3-dimensional graphic files are kept small. Due to the ease of creating and manipulating 3-dimensional objects all ini6al graphics were completed first in Ray Dream, and then were imported into Flash where they were redrawn in vector form. Resulting vector-based Flash files are small, and commonly less than 100 KB, and are quickly downloadable to client computers.The resulting tutorial leads students through the development of topographic contours of simple landforms such as hillside slopes, ridges, valleys, and closed depressions. The tutorial terminates with a simplis6c, but elegant, example of how to construct a topographic profile.
