Simulations are a form of competitive training that can provide transformational learning. Participants are pushed by the competition and their own desire to win as well as the continual feedback, encouragement, and guidance of a Business Coach. Simulations enable students to apply their knowledge and practice their business skills over and over.…

This paper describes designing and implementing a scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) study in a basic electrical circuits course at LaGuardia Community College. Inspired by my understanding of Shulman's (2005) concept of "signature pedagogy" and Mazur's (2009) emphasis on student-centered approaches, and aware that our students…

As one important professional base course in the electric information specialty, the course of "high frequency electronic circuit" has strong theoretical characteristic and abstract content. To enhance the teaching quality of this course, the computer simulation technology based on Multisim is introduced into the teaching of "high…

The haptic paddle is a force-feedback joystick used at several universities in teaching System Dynamics, a core mechanical engineering undergraduate course where students learn to model dynamic systems in several domains. A second goal of the haptic paddle is to increase the accessibility of robotics and haptics by providing a low-cost device for…

Constructionism places an emphasis on the process of constructing shareable artefacts. Many virtual worlds, such as "Second Life", provide learners with tools for the construction of objects and hence may facilitate in-world constructionist learning experiences. However, the construction tools available present learners with a significant barrier…

The current research article is based on a simple and practical way of employing the computational power of widely available, versatile software MS Excel 2007 to perform interactive computer simulations for undergraduate/graduate students in biology, biochemistry, biophysics, microbiology, medicine in college and university classroom setting. To…

This article showcases a virtual interactive participatory design activity for building a digital entomology lab. Conceptualized as a virtual complement to a general entomology course at Kansas State University, the lab would allow learners to explore morphological aspects of insects--their various forms and functions--in order to understand…

Just a few years ago, virtual worlds were credited with the power to transform the universe. Used since the late 1990s in military and medical applications, virtual worlds first gained mainstream media attention when Linden Lab released Second Life in 2003. While other worlds, including open source environments, have launched since then (examples…

Purpose: In the process of the implementation of the eBologna program and the recent change of the university system, curricula at German universities have been redesigned; courses have been condensed and learning content has been re-structured into modules, each of which requires an evaluation. Simultaneously, skills required for working in…

The present article is primarily targeted for the advanced college/university undergraduate students of chemistry/physics education, computational physics/chemistry, and computer science. The most recent software system such as MS Visual Studio .NET version 2010 is employed to perform computer simulations for modeling Bohr's quantum theory of…

Students in all areas of computing require knowledge of the computing device including software implementation at the machine level. Several courses in computer science curricula address these low-level details such as computer architecture and assembly languages. For such courses, there are advantages to studying real architectures instead of…

The authors investigate the potential of semantic web technologies to enhance "Virtual Fieldwork" resources and learning activities in the Geosciences. They consider the difficulties inherent in the concept of Virtual Fieldwork and how these might be reconciled with the desire to provide students with "authentic" tools for…

Concurrent engineering or overlapping activities is a business strategy for schedule compression on large development projects. Design parameters and tasks from every aspect of a product's development process and their interdependencies are overlapped and worked on in parallel. Concurrent engineering suffers from negative effects such as excessive…

This paper suggests a pedagogical approach to teaching the subject of behavioral modeling of switch-mode power electronics systems through simulation by general-purpose electronic circuit simulators. The methodology is oriented toward electrical engineering (EE) students at the undergraduate level, enrolled in courses such as "Power…

A project-oriented course for advanced undergraduate and graduate students is described for simulating multiple processor cores. Simics, a free simulator for academia, was utilized to enable students to explore computer architecture, operating systems, and hardware/software cosimulation. Motivation for including this course in the curriculum is…