Since 2006, I have maintained and developed software based upon codes written by Bob and Douglas Burger to be used in the instruction of shallow geophysics. Comprising five applications for seismic refraction, reflection, resistivity sounding, ground-penetrating radar diffraction, and combined gravity and magnetics, the software had been exclusively available with the Applied Geophysics textbook of Burger, Sheehan and Jones until recently. The book’s move to Cambridge University Press has made the software freely available through the publisher’s website. I will share why we have continued to maintain this software and consider it to be useful in this age of Python scripts, Jupyter notebooks, Excel, Matlab, and similar software.

There are two main goals for the software.  One is to be frictionless and user-friendly. The other is to avoid tedious calculations that derail students while providing enough support that meaningful analyses of real data can be undertaken by students. These are in conflict: Excel might be familiar but entering a geophysical model cumbersome. In contrast, commercial or professional software overwhelms the student with too many things (and is often quite expensive).

Our solution: freestanding software that launched and behaved like other applications that the student would be familiar with. Rather than write java apps, we used a development environment (Xojo) that generated platform-native applications for Mac, Windows, and Linux OSes from a common source code. This made using the software quite familiar.

Within that environment, we envisioned two main paths of use for the software. One was to explore synthetic examples, often as prompted by the textbook. The other was to analyze real data. The software was structured so both were fairly evident.

We deliberately limited the capability of any software-based inversion. Simply pressing an “invert” button produces no increase in understanding. Instead we found that being able to quickly adjust the model being used to fit the data freed the student from a series of calculations so they could focus on the relationship between model parameters and their data.

The continued use of this software package suggests that some of the notions that have guided us are still relevant. A similar approach in some other corners of earth science might prove productive.