This is a rough guide to how to use the Learning Object (LO)

Slider

The slider on the left contains environmental data about the Earth and the Sun. Thanks to Kavitha, she has managed to get hold of these data and the data tell us what the Earth and the Sun are like during the period from 1700 to 2007.

The LO implements a button that slides up and down to select a year.  The current year is displayed at the top left of the screen.  The temperature of the selected year is also displayed on the lower left over the little globe in red.  The temperature different from the previous year is displayed as a bar on the left of the LO. If the temperature this year is lower than the last, then a blue bar is displayed, otherwise a red bar is displayed to represent a hotter year than the last.

Personal Emission

There are three three buttons to click into three different activities: Car, Light, and Gas.

Car

The car activity will required the user to enter the number of litres of fuel he/she has used in a year. The user is also required to drag the car icon over the grey area of a fuel pump to select the different fuel type to calculate CO2 emission in kg caused by using different fuel.

Light

The amount of electricity used by different household appliances is explored here.  With each modern appliance, there is an energy label informing the user the amount of kWh being consumed annually.  This cane be entered into the LO to calculate the total amount of CO2 emission in a year.

Gas

Herethe gas bill can be used to help calculate the unmber of units of gas being consumed in a year.  Also, the user can turn on the cooker to boil the water in the pan without the lid on.  This consumes 4 units of energy and by dragging the lid to the pan, less energy is consumed.

The total of CO2 emission in kg are then calculated and displayed.  This figure is then multiplied by 7000000, the approx population of Hong Kong to give a rough estimation of Hong Kong's contribution to CO2 emission.  Finally, the CO2 in weight is expressed in terms of temparture.

Sun

The Sun attempts to show two things: sunspot information and the effect of temperature change in terms of Sun activities.

Sunspot

Simply click on the center Sun at the top half of the LO and a box appears to allow the user to select a year.  Upon the selection of a year, the sunspot information is displayed.

Sun Activities

The user can click on the drop down box at the top right to select one of two activity levels: low and high.  With an active Sun, there are less clouds formed thus allowing Sun's ray to heat up the Earth directly.  With an inactive Sun, cosmic rays caused more clouds to form thus block off Sun's ray to allow the Earth to cool.

Warning: to actually use the LO, it is necessary to inlcude a XML file containing the Earth's and Sun's information.  For this submission, a file called "sun.xml" is submitted and must be placed in the same directory as the movie.  The user is advise not to change the file in anyway.

Andrew and Kavitha