World language teachers are a special breed of teacher. In some cases, traveling and speaking other languages has profoundly changed their lives and they've channeled their passion into a career. In other cases, teachers are from another country, and are passionate about sharing their language and culture with students. World language teachers…

This article describes the development and assessment of a Nutritional Genomics course, designed to be held in a regular classroom during normal class periods, with few extra costs to the students or the department. The course was run as an upper-level undergraduate and lower-level graduate student course. Student taking the course spent 11 weeks…

As a result of the COVID-19 disruption experienced in Spring 2020 many institutions had to close their doors and move their courses online. Our team used an existing set of virtual reality (VR) organic chemistry laboratory experiences developed for students with accessibility challenges as an online replacement for the face-to-face Organic…

This article describes the design and initial implementation of a multidisciplinary, integrative learning course on the art and science of virtual worlds. The course combines complementary disciplines -- Computing, Physics, and Narrative Art -- in a single general education course for first-year students. The course attempts to incorporate…

For the past 10 years, the Virtual Tournament of Chemistry, TVQ, has been held in Brazil, engaging high school students with challenging questions that require cooperation, effort, and a literature search, while exploring the advantages of the Internet as a tool for self-instruction. The tournament has worked both as a way of narrowing the gap…

This chapter discusses issues concerning the design and implementation of the research project dealing with the changes in the levels of willingness to communicate, motivation, boredom and language anxiety, their relationships and factors influencing them in the course of the participants' visits to the virtual world Second Life. [For the complete…

Virtual reality (VR) has the potential to revolutionize education, as it immerses students in their learning more than any other available medium. By blocking out visual and auditory distractions in the classroom, it has the potential to help students deeply connect with the material they are learning in a way that has never been possible before.…

Virtual reality (VR) may be used as an innovative educational tool. However, in order to fully exploit its potential, it is essential to achieve the effect of immersion. To more completely submerge the user in a virtual environment, it is necessary to ensure that the user's actions are directly translated into the image generated by the…

Teacher candidates are required to learn foundational teaching skills in order to successfully address the needs of all students in the classroom. Mursion, a commercial education product, is a mixed reality technology which aims to provide teacher candidates with diverse opportunities to practice and reflect on the execution of teaching skills…

Computational approaches toward simulating chemical systems and evaluating experimental data has gathered great momentum in recent years. The onset of more powerful computers and advanced software has been instrumental to this end. This manuscript presents a hands-on activity which trains students in basic coding skills within the Matlab…

An application for visualizing the aggregation of structureless atoms is presented. The application allows us to demonstrate on a qualitative basis, as well as by quantitatively monitoring the aggregate surface/volume ratio, that the enhanced reactivity of nanoparticles can be connected with their large specific surface. It is suggested that,…

This paper provides two demonstrations of how Augmented Reality (AR), which is the projection of virtual information onto a real-world object, can be applied in the classroom and in the laboratory. Using only a smart phone and the free HP Reveal app, content rich AR notecards were prepared. The physical notecards are based on Organic Chemistry I…

For the past 15 years, pine forests across the United States have experienced devastating mountain and southern pine beetle outbreaks (Rosner 2015). These outbreaks are not uncommon but have become increasingly severe. Due to the effects of global warming, pine beetles have been able to survive warmer winters in their native habitats, producing…

The virtual-representational-abstract (VRA) framework adapts an evidence-based practice, the concrete-representational-abstract (CRA) framework, while trying to meet students and teachers where they are in terms of technology interest and use in education. This article discusses the VRA framework and the advantages of virtual manipulatives, and…

Getting individuals to invest in reason is often an uphill battle for Community of Philosophical Inquiry (CPI) practitioners, especially when the CPI experience does not straightforwardly model decision-making outside the classroom. Intermittently using roleplaying games (RPG's) to conduct CPI's may help in this regard, as it provides individuals…