In June of 2010 the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California,
hosted a two-day retrospective on the PLATO computer-based education
project developed at the University of Illinois. There were various
sessions on hardware, system software, games, etc., and a session chaired
by Ruth Chabay on "courseware" -- tutorials developed for the PLATO
environment. In the video of this session, found at
the ten-minute segment that starts at 45:43 is a presentation by me of an
interactive graphics-oriented tutorial on free-body diagrams that I wrote
in 1970 (!) that incorporates among other aspects having students name the
objects in the surroundings that exert forces on the chosen system. This
was written up in my article "Free-body diagrams (A PLATO lesson)",
American Journal of Physics 39, 1199-1202 (1971). The tutorial was part of
a PLATO-based mechanics course whose development I led.
This and other conference videos mentioned at the YouTube site will be of
interest to anyone interested in the history of computers, and of their
application to education, as the PLATO system was very far ahead of its
time. For example, we were using flat plasma-panel displays in the early
1970s, with 512 by 512 resolution and 16 by 16 touch sensitivity.