Enhancing 3D visualization for learning volumes of solid, an application in integral calculus: A multimedia courseware development

摘要

Mathematics is one of the major subjects which now integrates multimedia technology to its instructional materials and has become a phenomenon all around the world. The difficulty of visualizing mathematical concepts has been one of the major factors for students who find mathematics challenging, especially in calculating volumes of solid under the topic of integration. The objectives of the paper are to investigate on the suitable technique to produce a 3-dimensional (3D) visualization to demonstrate volumes of solid, to develop a multimedia courseware prototype for it and to evaluate the user acceptance of the prototype. The focus is on the methods of calculating volumes of solid under the topic of integration, which is a topic in Calculus. A multimedia courseware using Macromedia Toolbook implementing 2D graphics has been previously developed to assist the foundation students in UTP to learn integration. To enhance the student's visualization of calculating volumes of solid, a 3D graphics multimedia courseware has been developed using the ADDIE model. The tools that are used to develop the prototype are Blender for 3D modeling and SWiSH Max 4 for layout and interactivity of courseware. Questionnaire has been distributed to get feedback from 12 students pertaining to 3 categories which are visualization, navigation and content. The key findings from the analysis showed that the use of video, images, graph, audio and colour in the prototype is suitable. The user experience test performed on the UTP engineering students who have taken Calculus course resulted in a positive response whereby 90% of them agreed that the use of 3D images has helped them to understand better on how to calculate the volume of solids compared to referring only to 2D graphs like what they have learned previously. 77% of the respondents also said that they would use the courseware to support their learning of Calculus.