CHIP owes its origin to Tycho created by Dennis Kane and Gary Gladding of the Department of Physics at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Though many enhancements and modifications have been and continue to be made at Purdue, CHIP's main structure and look-and-feel remain true to Tycho that its creators so graciously provided us with. We are deeply grateful for their kindness for letting us modify and use Tycho freely. The enhancements made locally at Purdue are copyrighted by H. Nakanishi.

Many of the homework problems we use at Purdue are from the textbooks adopted for some of our lower division courses. We are grateful to John Wiley and Sons, Inc., W. H. Freeman and Co., and The McGraw Hill Companies, Inc. for letting us use those problems in this way. In addition, we thank those at CAPA (Computer-Assisted Personalized Approach) developed at the Michigan State University and at WebAssign (developed at and administered by the North Carolina State University) for making a vast number of problems coded in their respective formats available for conversion to the CHIP format.

CHIP is entirely written in Perl and consists of a number of interrelated CGI scripts, roughly in two groups: problem creation, presentation and scoring programs on one hand, and the gradebooks (student's, instructor's, and director's) on the other. The two groups of programs are now very tightly coupled and each has also a number of substantive extensions compared with the original Tycho codes provided to us. We wrote an article for the Indiana Higher Education Telecommunication System (IHETS) in 1998, describing an early version of CHIP. For more current information, please contact us: CHIP Administrator. If you have a specific technical question, you may wish to contact Prof. H. Nakanishi as well.

You can look at the current CHIP Homepage at http://chip.phyiscs.purdue.edu/. To actually go into the problem pages and gradebooks, you would need an account. A guest user account can be provided for experimentation by contacting us (as above) or by clicking on one of the Problem Report links you see on the CHIP course homepages. We understand that Univ. of Illinois uses Tycho for several of their introductory physics courses and you can also try them out in a similar manner. One such link is here. You will be asked to provide an ID/password but there is a description of what to do if you wish to use a guest account.