With the development of LabVIEW[TM] Education Edition schools can now provide experience of using this widely used software. Here, a few of the many applications that students aged around 11 years and over could develop are outlined in the resulting front panel screen displays and block diagrams showing the associated graphical programmes, plus a…

This research presents the results of a project that investigated how students use a library developed mobile app to locate books in the library. The study employed a methodology of formative evaluation so that the development of the mobile app would be informed by user preferences for next generation wayfinding systems. A key finding is the…

Systematic errors are often unavoidable in the introductory physics laboratory. As has been demonstrated in many papers in this journal, such errors can present a fundamental problem for data analysis, particularly when comparing the data to a given model. In this paper I give three examples in which my students use popular curve-fitting software…

Comics are powerful visual messages that convey immediate visceral meaning in ways that conventional texts often cannot. This article's authors created comic strips to teach anatomy more interestingly and effectively. Four-frame comic strips were conceptualized from a set of anatomy-related humorous stories gathered from the authors' collective…

Have you ever put your hand on an electric motor or motor-driven electric appliance and felt it vibrate? Ever wonder why it vibrates? What is there about the operation of the motor, or the object to which it is attached, that causes the vibrations? Is there anything "regular" about the vibrations, or are they the result of random causes? In this…

Today virtual world instruction faces many of the same educational challenges faced by Web-based instruction during its infancy. There is a lot of jargon and visions of the future being bandied about, but as Hirumi et al. note in the May/June and July/August 2010 issues of "TechTrends" "there little understanding of how to apply" pedagogical…

Successful adoption of new teaching and learning technologies in higher education requires the consensus of two sub-cultures, namely the technologist sub-culture and the academic sub-culture. This paper examines trends in adoption of open source software (OSS) for teaching and learning by comparing the results of a 2009 survey of 285 Chief…

The purpose of this review is to provide a systematic analysis of studies involving the use of computer-based interventions (CBI) to teach communication skills to children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). This review evaluates intervention outcomes, appraises the certainty of evidence, and describes software and system requirements for each…

Using a newly developed software application entitled "The Community College Transfer Calculator"[C], this article both quantifies the effect of specific course-taking patterns and stresses the need for an easy to understand tool for community college academic advisors, faculty, and students. The "Calculator" calculates the…

The Notable Children's Videos, Recordings, and Great Interactive Software for Kids lists are compiled annually by committees of the Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC), a division of the American Library Association (ALA). This article presents the lists for 2010 that were released in January during the ALA Midwinter Meeting in…

In recent years there has been a rapid expansion in the use of animated drawings for teaching physics. The benefits to the students are obvious. Rather than looking at still pictures in a textbook, they can observe a physical event and see how it plays out over time.

The purpose of this article is to explore the development of new methodological approaches that draw on ideas and concepts from natural sciences and apply them within the humanities. The main research example this article looks at is the re-application of a palaeontological process; it looks though the geological layers of sediment for fossilised…

CoLab is a collaborative tool for peer review of software programs for providing constructive feedback to first-time programmers. It targets two kinds of users: a trainer (who is the facilitator) and a trainee (whose programming skills have to be assessed and, if needed, improved). The tool provides real-time information on the reviewing ability…

The REQS package is an interface between the R environment of statistical computing and the EQS software for structural equation modeling. The package consists of 3 main functions that read EQS script files and import the results into R, call EQS script files from R, and run EQS script files from R and import the results after EQS computations.…

This study evaluated whether two people with multiple disabilities who could not easily use a computer through a standard input device (i.e., mouse or trackball) would be able to improve their pointing performance using thumb poke with a standard trackball through a Dynamic Trackball-Pointing Assistive Program (DTPAP) and a newly developed…