STEM Interface Overview

The STEM user interface is organized into two "perspectives", Designer perspective and a Simulation perspective. A perspective is a collection of "editors", "views", "menu bar", "tool bar" and a "perspective bar". An editor is a sub-window used to interactively modify one of STEM's components while a view is a sub-window used to display information to a user. The menu bar contains high-level menus for options and operations that can be selected by a user, while the tool bar contains icons that if selected (clicked on) cause STEM to perform actions. The perspective bar is used to switch between STEM's perspectives. These are illustrated in the image in Figure 1 below.

Similarly in the image in Figure 2 below, is STEM's Simulation perspective. Note that it does not have an editor area.

A user can switch back and forth between the two perspectives by clicking on them in the perspective bar. The views are grouped together in different areas of the perspective. Clicking on the title of a view displayed on its tab will bring that view to the foreground. Views can be closed by clicking on the "X" next to their name, or opened from the "Window" menu in the menu bar. Any view can be displayed in any perspective, though each perspective has a default set it displays when first created.