Discusses reasons for the failing of the computer in schools and universities, including: hardware emphasis, little focus on learning, little focus on students, software-based failure (elitist programs and weak interaction), the "idea of the moment," relation between information and learning, failure of teacher education, lack of empirical…

This paper proposes a new way to integrate history of science in science education to promote conceptual change by introducing the notion of historical microworld, which is a computer-based interactive learning environment respecting historic conceptions. In this definition, "interactive" means that the user can act upon the virtual environment by…

Illustrates the development of multimedia courseware such as CHEMMAT. Discusses the features of the courseware including adaptability, use of the teacher module, use of graphics and video clips, and the ease of customizing the content in various languages. (DDR)

This paper describes part of a project called Modeling Across the Curriculum which is a large-scale research study in 15 schools across the United States. The specific data presented and discussed here in this paper is based on BioLogica, a hypermodel, interactive environment for learning genetics, which was implemented in multiple classes in…