Book Reviews - Mar 2009 - Volume 109 (3)

Inquiry in the Classroom: Realities and Opportunities

Editors: Eleanor Abrams, Sherry Southerland and Peggy Silva
Information Age Publishing
P.O. Box 79049
Charlotte, NC 28271
2007; 270 pages
Paperback $39.99
Hardcover $73.99

Reviewer: Paul Narguizian
California State University, Los Angeles
Los Angeles, CA 90032

In an era of national and state academic standards, high-stakes testing, and, teacher accountability, the topic of inquiry-based learning and assessment has taken on a greater meaning in both pre-service and in-service teacher education programs and science classrooms across the nation. Of special importance is its grounding in issues and practices relating to the various forms of inquiry teaching along with the different factors which influence its integration in the classroom. In Inquiry in the Classroom: Realities and Opportunities, edited by Eleanor Abrams, Sherry Southerland and Peggy Silva, the reader is led on a path of discovery and inquiry (pun intended) into the world of inquiry-based learning and teaching by a wide array of experts in the field. The book is meant for persons involved in science education, educational policy and reform institutes, the National Science Foundation, school administration, classroom teaching, science teacher education at the university level, and the development of standardized and authentic assessment.

The central focus of the book deals with inquiry teaching, its various forms and what factors influence its integration into the science classroom. The introduction includes a relatively extensive literature review of various definitions and practices of inquiry found in the research literature. The editors along with the various authors point to the critical need for defining what inquiry is and what it looks like within the science classroom. Having this central theme in mind, the editors organized the text into six sections, which cover numerous challenges while at the same time providing solutions in inquiry-based learning and teaching strategies. Each section begins with one or more vignettes taken from various science classrooms describing a critical feature(s) of inquiry. The first section, entitled: Students' Knowledge and Skill With deals with learning about inquiry from a students' perspective along with the development of skills teacher needs to effectively plan inquiry experiences within the classroom. The proceeding five sections include headings such as: Selecting and Using Inquiry Approaches to Teach Science: The Influence of Context in Elementary, Middle, and Secondary Schools, Accommodating Student Diversity Within Inquiry, Standardized Tests and Inquiry: How the Accountability Movement Acts to Prevent Changes in Science Classrooms, Teacher Knowledge and Enhancing Inquiry, and Student-Scientists Partnerships: Exploring One Example of Inquiry in the Classroom. I found this type of organization to be highly advantageous. Based on the background information for each of the proceeding sections readily provided in the beginning of the text, the reader relates to the main point(s) of the various authors with greater clarity and insight.

While the book tries to consider how to increase and improve inquiry teaching and learning, the practical information available to science teachers to better inform their inquiry-based instructional strategies and varied assessment practices is cursory at best. Despite this limitation, Inquiry in the Classroom: Realities and Opportunities is a valuable resource to the literature of pre-service and in-service science teacher education.

3-D Computer Graphics: A Mathematical Introduction with OpenGL

Author: Samuel R. Buss
Cambridge University Press
40 West 20th Street
New York, NY 10011-4211
2003; 392 pages
ISBN: 0-521-82103-7

Reviewer: Medhat H. Rahim
Lakehead University
Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada P7B 5E1

This text has been shaped by the author's experience as a mathematician and in particular his participation in a range of applied computer projects, including projects in computer games and virtual reality. Initially the text was immerged on the basis of the author's earlier teaching a mathematics class on computer graphics and geometry. By then, it has been decided to meet the need for a text that would bring together the mathematics theory underlying computer graphics in an introductory and unified fashion. The text highlights the phenomenal growth of computer graphics in recent decades, progressing from simple 2-D graphics to high quality, complex and dynamic, 3-D graphics that are doable through the use of nowadays much improved personal computers and home game consoles to the extent that low-cost systems are able to display millions of images per second. In particular, the main purpose of this text may be succinctly described as to present the mathematical foundation of computer graphics along with a practical introduction to programming using OpenGL environment.

Further, for convincing 3-D computer graphics, this text explains thoroughly the requirement of software capable of displaying 3-D images in that the required software must keep track of the motion of multiple objects; and maintains information about the colors, lighting, and textures of many objects and displaying these objects on the screen at 30 or 60 frames per second. It should not be a surprise that 3-D computer graphics does require an extensive amount of mathematics such as geometry, calculus, linear algebra, numerical analysis, abstract algebra, data structures, and algorithms. This would portrait mathematics as an interdisciplinary elegant subject in the eyes of many.

There are 12 chapters with two appendices in the text. Chapter 1 deals with double buffering for animation with some background on coordinates, points, lines, and polygons and display models. Chapter 2 covers transformations and viewing in 2- and 3-D spaces with mapping to pixels. Chapter 3 deals with lighting, illumination, and shading while Chapter 4 covers averaging and interpolation. Chapter 5 covers texture mapping and Chapter 6 deals with color perception, and representation of color values. Chapter 7 provides details on Bezier smooth curves while Chapter 8 deals with B-Splines curves. Chapter 9 discusses the ray tracing techniques both basic and advanced ray tracing. Chapter 10 deals with intersection tracing covering fast intersections with rays in addition to pruning intersection tests while Chapter 11 covers the radiosity equations and their solutions. Finally, Chapter 12 discusses animation of position with representation of orientations and the concept of kinematics which refers to the purely geometric properties of motion such as position, orientation, velocity, and rotational velocity. In addition, two appendices, A and B, are added where Appendix A offers a quick review of the mathematical prerequisites for the text and B offers a ray tracing package, prepared by the author, that implements recursive ray tracing and that the package and its source code are freely available and can be downloaded from the text's Web site.

This computer science text is designed for use with advanced junior- or senior-level university courses or introductory graduate courses. Further, individuals studying this text have to be acquainted with OpenGL programming environment which in tern requires the reader to be familiar with C, C++ and perhaps with Java computing languages. As such, this text is suitable for computer science graduate students with a limited access for those mathematics/science teachers who lack the prerequisites mentioned above.

This text is an essential and useful reference for studying and understanding the basis for the mathematical foundation of computer graphics in 2- and 3-D along with a practical introduction to programming using the OpenGL environment. Its place in any library is a must.