HOW WE CAME UP WITH THE IDEA …

When choosing the topic for our website, we had practically no doubts about choosing fractals. Indeed, fractals seemed to be a perfect topic for an educational website. Fractals are very interesting yet too complicated mathematically, and because of not being in the school curriculum not very well-known too. In addition, they are not only mathematical, but involve many applications from other areas, which allowed us to try to make it interesting to everyone. Furthermore, fractals are very beautiful, which a website can very well take advantage of using images and Java applets.

… HOW WE MADE THE WEBSITE …

When researching fractal websites on the Internet, we found that most of them were graphical and contained very limited amounts of information, which was usually repeated on different websites. Attempting to make the website more informational we used books for most of our sources instead of other websites.

Practically all images on the website are either our own diagrams or famous fractals, which we recreated using fractal generating software. No images were directly scanned or taken from other computer sources. We used Fractint, a fractal generating program, with a lot of manual image editing in Photoshop to create the majority of fractals on the website. We also programmed a large portion of the images, which could not be created using Fractint, ourselves in BASIC. Bryce 3D, another program, was used for most 3D images such as fractal landscapes. Several other programs were used for some coloring and special effects.

We also programmed all of the Java applets and CGI programs on the website. With the exception of a few very famous algorithms, the algorithms used were our own as well. Some ideas for the programs were famous fractals and their properties, which we decided to show using Java and CGI. Other programs, such as fractal letters, were entirely our original ideas.

… AND THE RESULT

Taking over 11MB, our website contains information about practically every fractal-related topic, applications from almost all areas where fractals are used, and a large collection of algorithms and other information for programmers. In total it has 96 chapters, which contain over 120 pages of content. In houses a comprehensive collection of links, downloads, and references. There are over 300 in-text and gallery diagrams, a large portion of which are animations. In addition, there are 9 Java applets, 2 CGI fractal programs, and the contest with 3 other utilities, also made in CGI. Furthermore, the website has versions in two other languages, a text-based version, and a special one for kids.