Design of web‐based interactive 3D concept maps: A preliminary study for an engineering drawing course

Abstract

Concept map are not a new phenomenon in engineering education and are nowadays used to enhance "meaningful learning." In literature a lot of works on the use of the concept maps in education exist, but not many within the "interactive" context. This study contributes to expand the framework of research on the development of web-based 3D interactive concept maps. They incorporate web-based 3D interactive images that support the learning of abstract and difficult topics in Engineering drawing course, motivating the students and increasing their attention. The effects of different learning strategies (2D concept mapping vs. web-based 3D interactive concept mapping) on the learning outcomes and on the spatial ability are investigated. The results of this study shows that Web-based 3D interactive concept maps compensates spatial ability deficits, that is, helps students who have low spatial ability to build an effective mental representation of the learning content. ß 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Comput Appl Eng Educ 23:403-411, 2015; View this article online at wileyonlinelibrary.com/ journal/cae;

Concept-based and Fuzzy Adaptive E-learning

“…The student learns C.No "4" first because it has the highest concept impact (83.4) between all the concepts, and then s/he learns the following concepts that have smaller concept impact values respectively such as C.No "8" "1" and "2". However, if two or more concepts have the same concept impact value (CIV) such as C.No "3", "7" and "9", they have the same CIV (16), therefore, the priority to be learned next is the highest concept weight between these concepts that have the same concept impact value (CIV). C.No "3" has the highest concept weight (1.0), so, the student learns it first, then C.No "7" (0.6), and C.No "9" (0.3) respectively.…”

“…The concept map has been used in many research projects to help the students learn and motivate them when tackling challenging topics, such as engineering drawing [16]. The findings of this piece of research showed that the concept maps helped the students to understand how to correspond the shapes to the appropriate sides of a Socket Head Screw, they could improve their work by using 3-D animations with immediate step-by-step instructions and apply it to students with both low spatial ability and high spatial-ability.…”

Virtual Worlds and the 3D Web – Time for Convergence?

“…3D Web virtual labs in engineering are quite numerous. Violente et al [28] designed web-based interactive 3D concept maps for an engineering drawing course and showed that this helped students with deficits in spatial abilities to better represent the content to be learned. SAFAS (Structure And Form Analysis System) [29], is a 3D Web design tool for architects and structural engineers.…”

Simple semantic enhancement of instructional hypertext

“…and edges contain relations between those—that put these notions “in motion,” enabling their usage to generate new nodes or practical conclusions that drive behavior. This was the author's early idea of knowledge; literature survey eventually showed that this idea is not new and is still in active use in research . If knowledge can (with all needed approximations) be presented in the form of a graph, then this graph can be embedded into the text as an invisible, underlying structure, enabling arbitrary coupling of terms to obtain their relations—using a well‐accepted, ubiquitous GUI element.…”