As the viewer watches the opening credits for the program "Entertainment Tonight," the screen comes to life with rotating shapes and spinning geometric patterns. One has the sense of travelling on an imaginary voyage through space. Many of the computer generated displays common now on television use such visual devices as linear perspective,…

Arguing that females need instruction in visuo-spatial skills before adolescence, when they begin to lag behind males in the development of these skills that are so strongly correlated with success in technical careers, this paper discusses the use of the three-dimensional and spherical graphics of ExperLOGO to develop spatial skills in students…

This exploratory study investigated whether there are differences between males and females in the strategies used to construct mental representations from three-dimensional objects in a dimensional travel display. A Silicon Graphics IRIS computer was used to create the travel displays and mathematical models were created for each of the objects…

The premise of the Creative Technology Project, a collaboration by Autodesk, Inc., the School of Education at Oregon State University, and Novato Unified School District in the San Francisco Bay Area, was that children's cognitive abilities could be enhanced by having them develop, displace, transform, and interact with 2D and 3D…

This study investigated place location learning from a simulated environmental exploration experience in terms of two variables: gender (both cognitive and affective effects) and presence and/or type of accompanying map. Subjects were 120 fourth and fifth grade students, who were randomly selected and assigned after stratification on gender. The…

This exploratory study of the effects of the new visual communications media imagery (e.g., video games, digital television, and computer graphics) on the visual perception process is designed to provide a theoretical framework for research, introduce appropriate research instruments for such study, and experiment with the application of biometric…

Previous studies indicate that only 6 percent of the nation's population possess the minimum level of understanding of science and technology needed to function minimally as citizens and consumers. Many educators speculate that scientific illiteracy originates in elementary school classrooms, not from intellectual inferiority, but rather from…