August 10, 1995

NCSU researcher launches cyberspace study aid

In days gone by, students who had trouble with their lessons took their workbooks home and worked the same problems or answered the same questions again and again--on paper. Sometimes students stayed after class to get special help from the teacher, who demonstrated the concepts using unwieldy models and crude chalkboard drawings.

Dr. John Russ, a research associate in materials science and engineering at N.C. State University, knows that those methods no longer work in our computer age. His CD-ROM,Visualizations in Materials Science(VIMS II) , has gone into its second edition, and now Russ has taken his product one step further by launching it into cyberspace.

VMS II is now available on the World-Wide Web--and not only for NCSU engineering students. Anyone in the world with Web access can view and interact with the site.

Working on a Macintosh computer, Russ and graduate student Rhett Guthrie and undergraduates Jake Huffman, Todd Miles and Brent Neal have constructed the Web site. With over 300 work problems, 700 movies, and 1500 document pages, the site is one of the largest on the Web, according to Russ.

Using it is easy. A student clicks on the desired chapter and chooses to view text, problems or brief movies. The movies--either live action video clips or animations--cover a variety of topics related to materials science. Russ has included a tour of a steel plant complete with sound effects, a tour of a junkyard with a sledgehammer to show how things break, and a video of blacksmithing in colonial Williamsburg to name a few.

Russ felt that this more visual approach to teaching was necessary for the students in introductory engineering courses to comprehend the subject. Classes are usually large, and the instructor tries to convey geometrical and graphical information through lectures. Russ said, "we have a lot of information that we're trying to pump into them through the wrong conduit--their ears instead of their eyes."

In 1990, he took his first step to solve the problem by developing computer simulations, graphics and animations to use in class. "As we collected more and more of that, it became more and more apparent that simply using that in class to enhance the presentation and lectures was not enough because, as one student said to me, if these are such complex topics that you can't draw them on the board, how...am I supposed to take notes on it?"

Russ' answer to that question was to design a CD-ROM companion to his course, a study aid that would supplement the text and compensate for its limitations. For example, a drawing in a textbook of a molecule gives students only one perspective--they must imagine how the atoms fit together and how the molecule looks from different points of view.

Because students often have trouble visualizing structures this way, Russ and a number of his students over the past five years designed computer graphics that give students a complete understanding of spatial relationships. Students can rotate an image on the screen and even shrink the atoms down to points to see the internal geometry of the molecule.

Both students and professors profit from the tool. Early in the development of the project, Russ compared test scores of students with access to computer graphics and those without. "The students that get to use the graphics on the average do one full letter grade better than students that don't," Russ said.

Professors at other institutions have also benefitted from the CD. Dr. James Wittig, associate professor of materials science at Vanderbilt University, has used it to demonstrate concepts to students in laboratories.

"It gave me, at least, the ability to let them work at their own speed," he said. "As a teaching aid, it was very effective because some of these phenomena are hard to draw."

The CD has done well at campuses around the globe. Case Western Reserve, Georgia Tech, and universities in Perth, Australia, and Stockholm, Sweden, are among the twenty-five or so universities using the CD.

Though satisfied with the international interest in his product, Russ was concerned by the problem here at home: only a handful of students at his own university had computers with CD-ROM drives. Because more students are plugged into the Internet, placing the learning tool on the World-Wide Web was the next logical step.

Russ views using CDs, Web sites and electronic communications with teachers as the future of education, and not only at the university level. He's currently pursuing funding to create versions of the CD for elementary, middle and high school students.

He tried out a version last year in Helen Adams' class at Penny Road Elementary School in Cary. "We had fourth grade students who would come in and say, 'Well, Miss Adams, I really understand the metallic, covalent and ionic bonds, but I'm having a little bit of trouble with the Van der Waals bond,'" Russ said.

That level of comprehension--along with increasing student engagement in the material, enthusiasm for the work, and better test scores--suggest that developments in electronic education like Russ' will soon become indispensable supplements to traditional educational strategies.

Go to the Visualizations in Materials Science II Page.

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