Reviewed are four computer software packages including "Project Classify: Mammals,""Living Science Textbook--The Frog,""Life Science Help Series," and "Talking Dinosaurs." Discussed are availability, features, strengths, and weaknesses. (CW)

Educational software tools are considered to enrich teaching strategies, providing a more compelling means of exploration and feedback than traditional blackboard methods. Moreover, software simulators provide a more motivating link between theory and practice than pencil-paper methods, encouraging active and discovery learning in the students.…

Conflicts occur when learners interact with pedagogical agents and virtual characters. Such conflicts--arising from technological limitations, psychosocial perceptions, and pedagogical inadequacies--hinder communication and interaction between virtual characters and learners, and impede successful engagement with learning tasks and experiences. To…

StarLogo The Next Generation (TNG) enables secondary school students and teachers to model decentralized systems through agent-based programming. TNG's inclusion of a three-dimensional graphical environment provides the capacity to create games and simulation models with a first-person perspective. The authors theorize that student learning of…

Understanding the concept of the sampling distribution of a statistic is essential for the understanding of inferential procedures. Unfortunately, this topic proves to be a stumbling block for students in introductory statistics classes. In efforts to aid students in their understanding of this concept, alternatives to a lecture-based mode of…

The Wednesday before Thanksgiving presents a challenge to teachers in many U.S. schools. Some students are absent because they are traveling to be with their extended families for the holiday. Other students, assuming that nothing important will happen at school when so many of their peers are absent, may also be absent. One school's solution to…

This research focuses on some of the affordances provided by SimCalc software, suggesting that its use can have important consequences for students' mathematical affect and motivation. We describe an episode in an inner-city SimCalc environment illustrating our approach to the study of affect in the mathematics classroom. We infer students'…

Technology was integrated into service-learning activities to create an interactive teaching method for undergraduate students at a large research institution. Chemistry students at the University of Central Florida partnered with high school students at Crooms Academy of Information Technology in interactive service learning projects. The…

The need for professional programmers in embedded applications has become critical for industry growth. This need has increased the popularity of embedded software design courses, which are resource-intensive and space-limited in traditional real lab-based instruction. To overcome geographic and time barriers in enhancing practical skills that…

An experimental tool is described for the investigation of the human control behavior for slow responding dynamic systems. The Program for Research on Operator Control in an Experimental Simulated Setting (PROCESS) is a simulation of a dynamic water-alcohol distillation system that can be used in research on operator training. In particular,…

Developers of educational multimedia programs have expectations about the way in which they will be used. These expectations can be broadly categorised as either functional (primarily related to the interface) or educational (related to learning designs, processes and outcomes). However, student users will not always engage with educational…

SystemC is a system-level design and simulation language based on C++. We've been using SystemC for computer organization and design projects for the past several years. Because SystemC is embedded in C++ it contains the powerful abstraction mechanisms of C++ not found in traditional hardware description languages, such as support for…

This lab is a computer simulation of transmission genetics. It presents students with a genetic phenomenon--the inheritance of a randomly--selected trait. The students' task is to determine how this trait is inherited by designing their own crosses and analyzing the results produced by the software.

Although information and communication technologies have become an integral part of life in the United States, they have not yet been adequately integrated into adult language and literacy programs. This raises concerns because of the potential value of technology for enhancing learning and because of the vital role of technological proficiency as…

Second Life has become increasingly popular with educators and educational institutions, because of the educational possibilities it seems to offer. While there has been a lot of hype and academic publications about educational design or the theoretical framing of teaching in virtual environments, there have been few publications focusing on…