We call this Lobby, in analogy to a lobby room. It's like your home page where all your
Virtual Math Teams activities start from. In the Lobby, you can see who is online, what
tasks are available, and whether there are any ongoing chat sessions. You can choose
to enter chat rooms that are open to you where discussion about certain mathematical
problem is going on or has occurred.
The lobby has two main components that are organized in frames. On the right is a chat
room where you can compose your message and talk to people who are available in the
lobby. There are two windows on the top of the main chat window that enable you to see
who is online (for details of the features in the chat room, see help manual on Chat
Room).
The left side consists of four sections: Welcome, My Rooms, Open Rooms, and Limited
Access. You can access them by clicking the tabs on the top.
Welcome page provides a Sandbox chat room with a whiteboard where you can play
and experiment with the way things work.
My Rooms lists all rooms where you are a "member", which means you either entered
the room or the room owner added you from his/her teammate list while creating it. You
can go back to these rooms to remember what you and the other members did there.
Rooms are organized by topic, which usually is the name of the problem that the room is
created to work on. You can also create a new room under any topic.
Open Rooms lists all rooms that are now open to you. You can click to join any of the
them. Rooms in Limited Access as the name indicates, are limited in access. You need
to get the permission from the room owner to join the room.
For each room, you can also see its owner, list of its members, and their status (online
or offline).
Please check the pages under the "lobby room" on the left to get more details about the
functions mentioned above.
