Appropriate educational technologies have the potential to make physics' concepts more accessible through visualization, modeling and multiple representations. Students are engaged in more powerful scientific activities and they are able to perform investigations that would not be possible without the use of technology. This paper presents…

To build on classroom experiments and lectures, Daniel Sweeney has his 9th grade earth science students act out scientific concepts on a 15-by-15-foot mat on the floor of the room. Object-tracking cameras mounted on scaffolding around the space collect data based on the students' movements while immersing them in the experience through a video…

Teachable agent is a type of pedagogical agent which instantiates Learning-by-Teaching theory through simulating a "naive" learner in order to motivate students to teach it. This paper discusses the limitation of existing teachable agents and incorporates intrinsic motivation to the agent model to enable teachable agents with initiative…

A traditional approach centred on weekly lectures, perhaps supported by tutorials, still predominates in modern legal education in Australia. This approach tends to focus on the transmission of knowledge about legal rules and doctrine to students, who adopt a largely passive role. Criticisms of the traditional approach have led to law schools…

Computer-simulated experiments offer many benefits to engineering curricula in the areas of safety, cost, and flexibility. We report our experience in developing and deploying a computer-simulated unit operations laboratory, driven by the guiding principle of maximum fidelity to the physical lab. We find that, while the up-front investment in…

An object that moves is spotted almost effortlessly; it "pops out." When the observer is stationary, a moving object is uniquely identified by retinal motion. This is not so when the observer is also moving; as the eye travels through space all scene objects change position relative to the eye producing a complicated field of retinal motion.…

Second Life's unstructured atmosphere and wide-open spaces where student creativity can grow and flourish are two of the reasons Pepperdine University Professor Bill Moseley integrated the program into his curriculum. In this article, the author discusses how Second Life works and its challenges. Second Life is often described as a 3-D version of…

The annual "Horizon Report" describes the continuing work of the New Media Consortium's Horizon Project, a qualitative research project established in 2002 that identifies and describes emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, or creative inquiry on college and university campuses within the next five years. The…

In an online class, it's not unusual to never see a teacher or classmates face-to-face. It's not unusual to interact with an instructor and classmates through discussion boards or e-mail and to get information through online documents and presentations rather than live lectures. In the spring of 2009 students in the online class "Warcraft:…

Original research and content creation in the university environment have historically been the domain of faculty and their graduate students. Nowadays, however, undergraduate programs at universities across the country are putting undergrads in the center of the action. This article describes some of these programs--at Duke University (North…

User-created virtual worlds, such as Second Life, are a hot topic in higher education. Thousands of educators are currently exploring and using Second Life, and hundreds of colleges and universities have purchased and developed their own private islands in Second Life, including the University of Kansas Medical Center (KUMC). Because it is so easy…

With the advances in computational power, Internet access and speed, and graphical 3D reproductions possible on an "ordinary" home computer, and with the development of new software products that place the ability to create new digital content in the hands of "ordinary" people, everyone is beginning to see in virtual worlds emergent behaviors that…

Despite its image as an all-American city, downtown Peoria, Illinois, home of Bradley University, is also a place of strip clubs and violent crime. For undergraduates, it's a risky environment in which to conduct field research. Edward Lamoureux, an associate professor in Bradley's multimedia program, saw a better place in the virtual world Second…

The technology is simple: Mobile technologies such as handheld computers and global positioning systems work in sync to create an alternate, hybrid world that mixes virtual characters with the actual physical environment. The result is a digital simulation that offers powerful game-playing opportunities and allows students to become more engaged…

This teaching brief presents a Microsoft® Excel simulation designed to complement and expand upon the well-known matchstick/die game introduced by Goldratt in "The Goal." This simulation performs 100 replications of a 40-period processing run for low, medium, and high levels of process variation and displays the comparative results…