Multimedia in Education

Educational multimedia is one other area that we are looking into with the development of a hypertext textbook for teaching introduction to computer science for non-majors (CS001). The goal in teaching such a course is to provide students with the knowledge of computing that they need to successfully apply computing in their own discipline. This couple with a new network of UNIX workstations for educational use motivates us to explore the possibility of developing an object hypermedia textbook for this CS001 introductory course. An integral part of this hypermedia book is a series of science, engineering and economics case studies that are used to introduce fundamental concepts in programming and computing, and to motivate the students to learn the material and applied it in their other courses. More specifically, we are working in a hypermedia textbook integrating text, graphics, animation of programs and algorithms, video and sound as appropriate to serve as the basis for a CS001 course for non-majors. This textbook integrates lecture material, laboratory projects, self study material and background reference material in a form that student can readily access and annotate with their own notes. In addition, we propose to augment the hypermedia system with tools to monitor how student use the hypermedia textbook. This will allow us to better understand how to organize, manage and present University-level course material in a hypermedia document. A BS thesis has been developed around these ideas while another one is in progress developing more case studies. A prototype has been build demonstrating a lot of these ideas. Some of our results have already been published in "Teaching Computer Science for Non-Majors through a Hypertext Book" while the more complete work has been submitted for further publication.

Related Publications

Conferences and Workshops

1995

S. D. Nikolopoulos, Samaras, G., Spooner D., Skolnick M. (1995) "Teaching Computer Science for Non-Majors through a Hypertext Book", Proc. 2nd Hellenic Conference on Mathematics and Computer Science in Education, Nicosia, April 1995