Students from the digital age are visual and active learners who prefer strong interaction with their peers and instructors. Traditional lecturing styles are insufficient in grasping the attention of these students and in supporting their learning needs. Tablet PCs and interactive teaching applications have proven to be effective in increasing student engagement and supporting teacher instruction. More importantly, leveraging these technologies, innovative teaching methodologies can be developed to improve lecturing efficiency and facilitate assessment. This paper presents an on-going project in the Computer Science Department at Prairie View A&M University that focuses on revamping the teaching of computer science and engineering courses by incorporating tablet PCs and modern educational technology into the classroom. The goal of the project is to enhance student and teacher interaction, improve teaching effectiveness, and increase students' interests in course content. In this paper, we describe the development of an advanced learning lab equipped with tablet PCs and a SMART interactive learning system. Our goal is to use the educational infrastructure to promote problem-based learning, collaborative learning, and assessment. We present a novel digital ink based computerized testing system-Real Test, which is used to comprehensively measure student class performance. A supplementary virtual reality learning platform is also discussed for enhancing student learning outcomes. Finally, we discuss our phased implementation plan which ensures that students benefit from the innovated learning technology throughout their degree plan.
展开▼
