Large drop towers let you experience a couple of seconds of nearly free fall before stopping gracefully in magnetic brakes or bouncing a number of times on compressed air, as in the Turbo Drop tower considered in this work, where many complementary representations are used. An accelerometer taken along on the ride captured the forces experienced…

Activities that engage high school students in visualizing chemical phenomena can help them develop representational competence to think about and communicate their understanding of these phenomena. This paper presents a collaborative learning activity that can engage precollege students in designing a poster that describes four different types of…

With the help of augmented reality apps objects and text can be added virtually to the physical world (e.g. physical experiments) in real time. The augmented reality (AR) app 'PUMA: "Spannungslabor"' enhances simple electric circuits experiments for students with virtual representations based on the electron gas analogy including…

In this digital ITEMS module, Nikole Gregg and Dr. Brian Leventhal discuss strategies to ensure data visualizations achieve graphical excellence. Data visualizations are commonly used by measurement professionals to communicate results to examinees, the public, educators, and other stakeholders. To do so effectively, it is important that these…

In this media-saturated society, students need to think more critically about the media they encounter and that they are producing. Through filmmaking, students can link geographic theory and the real world, bridging the distance from readings/lectures/discussions to the geography on the ground, making the abstract concrete. But constructing films…

Heart valves play a vital role in efficient circulation of the blood, and the details of their physical structure are related crucially to their function. However, it can be challenging for the learner to make the mental connection between anatomical structures of valves and the changing pressure gradients that the valves experience and come to an…

Open educational resources (OER) can be described in numerous ways (Creative Commons, 2012). In this visualization based context, however, OER can be defined as ...teaching, learning and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use or re-purposing by…

Teaching poetry offers both challenges and promises for student engagement and response. Because of the ways many students interact with poems in school settings--with an emphasis on the technical elements of poems, rather than on the emotional resonances they evoke--for many learners, poetry can often seem elusive and uncommonly difficult. This…

Case-based instruction (CBI) offers a promising method for promoting problem-solving skills in learners. However, during CBI, the instructor shoulders major responsibility for shaping the learning that takes place. Research indicates that the facilitation techniques used during case discussions influence what gets covered, and to what extent,…

Developing "Thinking and Understanding in Young Children" presents a comprehensive and accessible overview of contemporary theory and research about young children's developing thinking and understanding. Throughout this second edition, the ideas and theories presented are enlivened by transcripts of children's activities and conversations taken…

E-learning materials often have a linear design where all learners are forced into a single-mode pedagogy, which is contrary to the interaction that occurs in face-to-face learning. Ideally, e-learning materials should be nonlinear, interactive, contain context-sensitive and active learning elements, and accommodate various learning levels and…

This work presents a unique education resource for both process engineering students and the industry workforce. The learning environment is based around spherical imagery of real operating plants coupled with interactive embedded activities and content. This Virtual Reality (VR) learning tool has been developed by applying aspects of relevant…

Progress on a hypertextbook on the theory of computing is presented. The hypertextbook is a novel teaching and learning resource built around web technologies that incorporates text, sound, pictures, illustrations, slide shows, video clips, and--most importantly--active learning models of the key concepts of the theory of computing into an…

This article describes how an interdisciplinary science class uses visuals in ways that can be adapted across disciplines and academic levels. The key to the use of visuals is that they are integral to the learning of the students, whether we begin with visuals to improve writing and thinking or use written texts as the basis for visual…