Chalkboards and overhead projectors may never seem the same. It's all the result of a partnership between the school and the University's Office of Information Technology and Communication , which considers SEAS an important laboratory for use of the new classroom technologies. Three of the updated rooms, equipped for different and specialized uses, opened this semester in the Mechanical Engineering Building. One features a desktop computer for each student. In the second, desktops are shared by two students working as a team, while the third offers connections for laptop units.
Students work individually or in teams on problems that are loaded into their computers.
Instructors discuss the work, advise the students, and display text and images on a big screen to illustrate points. Now engineering faculty have classrooms that facilitate working with students in an interactive mode. All of the classrooms have video projectors that can enlarge and project the image of any transparent or solid object that the professor might want to discuss. Instructors can focus on a tiny area of the object, such as a small portion of a scale model, and project that area onto the screen at various magnifications - and in three dimensions. They allow students to learn by working through a problem in the classroom, alone or as part of a small team, rather than listening to someone solve the problem.