Educators know that people learn best by doing. When students are doing something rather than reading or learning about it, they learn better. Immersive environments help students retain more information and speed up their learning. There's an enhancement in the way they learn. Immersive environments--which utilize technologies like simulations,…

Chemical process simulation is one of the most fundamental skills that is expected from chemical engineers, yet relatively few graduates have the opportunity to learn, in depth, how a process simulator works, from programming the unit operations to the sequencing. The University of Calgary offers a "hands-on" postgraduate course in…

The projects Xmath (Bringslid and Canessa, 2002) and dMath (Bringslid, de la Villa and Rodriguez, 2007) were supported by the European Commission in the so called Minerva Action (Xmath) and The Leonardo da Vinci programme (dMath). The Xmath eBook (Bringslid, 2006) includes algorithms into a wide range of undergraduate mathematical issues embedded…

The purpose of this article is to present the results of a study conducted to investigate how the attributes of 3-D technology such as avatars, 3-D space, and comic style bubble dialogue boxes affect participants' social, cognitive, and teaching presences in a blended problem-based learning environment. The community of inquiry model was adopted…

This article attempts to describe students' process of learning physics using the notion of experiencing variation as the basic mechanism for learning, and thus explores what variation, with respect to a particular object of learning, that students experience in their process of constituting understanding. Theoretically, the analysis relies on…

While many reports espouse the potential impact that 3-D virtual worlds are expected to have on teaching and learning in higher education in a few years, there are few empirical studies that inform instructional design and learning assessment in virtual worlds. This study explores the nature and process of learning in Second Life in a graduate…

In this paper we explore students' engagement in a new media enhanced problem-based learning (PBL) environment and investigate the characteristics of these environments that facilitate learning. We investigated both student experiences using a new media enhanced PBL environment and the specific elements students found most supportive of their…

This study investigates users' perception and acceptance of mixed reality (MR) technology. Acceptance of new information technologies has been important research area since 1990s. It is important to understand the reasons why people accept information technologies, as this can help to improve design, evaluation and prediction how users will…

This paper reports on findings from a five-teacher, exploratory case study, critically observing their implementation of a technology-intensive, augmented reality (AR) mathematics curriculum unit, along with its paper-based control. The unit itself was intended to promote multiple proportional-reasoning strategies with urban, public, middle school…

The "Horizon Report" series is the most visible outcome of the New Media Consortium's Horizon Project, an ongoing research effort established in 2002 that identifies and describes emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, research, or creative expression within education around the globe. This volume, the "2010…

This paper explores and discusses arguments for the use of virtual environments and interactive avatars in supporting the achievement of student learning goals within conventional educational contexts. It describes and evaluates arguments promoted by some authors (eg, van den Brekel, 2007; Deuchar & Nodder, 2003; Dickey, 2003; Facer, 2004; de…

As it happens in other fields of engineering, blended learning is widely used to teach process control topics. In this paper, the inclusion of a reactive element--a Fuzzy Logic based controller--is proposed for a blended learning approach in an introductory control engineering course. This controller has been designed in order to regulate the…

New technology has brought with it new tools for learning, and research has shown that the educational potential of video games resonates with scholars, teachers, and students alike. In "Augmented Learning", Eric Klopfer describes the largely untapped potential of mobile learning games--games played on such handheld devices as cell phones, Game…

This research assessed the value of case study methodology in the design of an educational computer simulation. Three sources of knowledge were compared to assess the value of case study: practitioner and programmer knowledge, disciplinary knowledge, and knowledge obtained from a case study of teacher practice. A retrospective analysis revealed…

This paper presents the results of a study on the use of a virtual reality (VR) world in a German language classroom. After participating in a lesson on the use of commands, students experienced the language and culture through navigation in a VR world. It is argued that this new medium allows for students to be immersed in the target culture and…