Computer-equipped Classroom Research Articles

A SIMULATED REAL-TIME SEVERE WEATHER NOWCASTING

Abstract. An upper-level undergraduate course entitled "Radar and Satellite Meteorology" has offered for the past five years at the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, University of Wisconsin-Madison. This course has two components, one is the lectures on remote sensing theory, and the other is laboratory exercises that involve the investigation of archived radar and satellite data. One of the most popular laboratory exercises, according to the students' feedback, is the simulated real-time severe weather nowcasting in the computer-equipped classroom. The students are experienced a severe weather outbreak and placed in a real-time operational decision-making environment. Archived Level-II and Level-III Next-generation Radar (NEXRAD) data is viewed with either the freely available Integrated Data Viewer (IDV) or McIDAS software packages. The "bundling" feature of these software packages allows the instructor to pre-package radar data (e.g., reflectivity, storm-relative Doppler velocity) and feed it to the students every four to five minutes, simulating the delay between radar volume scans. Teams of students are required to monitor the evolution of the situation and issue severe weather warnings based on radar analysis skills developed in lecture and previous labs. Documented storm reports are also integrated into the lab to assist — or sometimes detract from — the students' warning decisions, and the classroom clock is even adjusted to correspond with the time of the events. This exercise provides students with a unique operational experience that is often missing from the undergraduate curriculum. Its inherent portability and flexibility allows instructors to adapt it to any historical severe weather event, making it appropriate for courses in mesoscale and synoptic meteorology in addition to remote sensing.

Teaching Multimedia Data Protection Through an International Online Competition

Low-cost personal computers, wireless access technologies, the Internet, and computer-equipped classrooms allow the design of novel and complementary methodologies for teaching digital information security in electrical engineering curricula. The challenges of the current digital information era require experts who are effectively able to counteract piracy, forgery, copyright infringement, and so on. Digital watermarking is one possible technique for fighting piracy, which consists of the insertion of invisible but robust information to protect the data. In this paper, a new teaching approach, designed for testing student skills and progressing in multimedia data protection, is presented. This consists of a distributed security game where students compete by first using the developed watermarking techniques and then attacking each other's methods, thus verifying their robustness. Groups of students from different universities and countries play against each other, trying to compromise other teams' hiding systems while protecting their own data from attacks. The proposed methodology can be considered as an appealing approach for stimulating learning, cooperation, and team competition. The effectiveness of the teaching method is verified by a student survey and their academic results.

Strategies, Challenges and Prospects for Active Learning in the Computer-Based Classroom

The introduction of computer-equipped classrooms into engineering education has brought with it a host of opportunities and issues. Herein, some of the challenges and successes for creating an environment for active learning within computer-based classrooms are described. The particular teaching approach developed for undergraduate electrical engineering courses is presented. Longitudinal assessment data regarding in-class utilization of computers in the context of achieving program and course learning outcomes are shared.

Novel Technique to Improve Power Engineering Education Through Computer-Assisted Interactive Learning

This paper presents a novel interactive teaching method utilizing computers to improve engineering education. The course material is divided into units covering major topics. First, the hardware related to the topic is presented using PowerPoint slides and industry-furnished videos. This is followed by a presentation of the theory. Then the students, who use computers, jointly derive the equations and their practical applications. In a computer-equipped classroom, the instructor outlines each step of the analysis, and then the students proceed to develop the equation(s) using their computers. After a few minutes, the instructor confirms the equation and the students make corrections. The knowledge expected from the students is summarized at the end of each unit in the form of questions. Instead of a final exam, each student has to pass a test at the end of each unit. The unit exam has a calculation and an essay part. The teaching effectiveness is assessed with questions that the students answer before and after the completion of the unit of study. The method has been partially tested with promising results.

Language Alternation in a Computer-equipped Foreign Language Classroom: The Intersection of Teacher Beliefs, Language, and Technology

The linguistic context of the computer-mediated environment is of particular importance to better understanding the impact of computer-assisted language learning. Yet few studies have documented actual practices in such an environment. An ethnographically based case-study approach was used in this study to document the attitudes, activities, behaviours, and beliefs of one teacher and his students in a third-semester university French class as they met weekly in a computer-equipped classroom. Despite his enthusiasm, the intersecting teacher beliefs, linguistic difficulties, and technical problems impeded the creation of an environment conducive to sustaining lessons in the target language. Moreover, the teacher's activities in the computer-equipped classroom often privileged computer literacy over linguistic proficiency.

Lecturing with Technology

presentation software and automating existing lectures will not automatically give you the results you are seeking. As the number of computer-equipped class rooms continues to increase, using pre sentation slide lectures presents some unique challenges and problems. Both authors have used computer-equipped classrooms for the past six years. We found that using the computer as the course presentation vehicle is not the panacea we originally thought it to be.

From a high-tech to a low-tech writing classroom: “You can't go home again”

This article describes one teacher's study of the effects of changes in teaching environments upon the teacher. The author-subject moves from a computer-equipped classroom, where he has become accustomed to teaching first-year writing, to a conventional classroom. He finds that he must change his teaching radically in this new-old environment. He finds himself unable to make these changes, at least in a single semester, and understands that we can't expect teachers to adapt easily or rapidly to new teaching environments.