By Paul Dellinger, The Roanoke Times

September 28, 2003

BLACKSBURG - Imagine a textbook that talks back to you, shows you pictures that move and even helps you with your homework.

Such a "book" is actually a DVD-ROM, developed after more than three years of work by a company called T2I2, or more formally known as Trivedi Technology Innovations International, at Tech's Corporate Research Center. It is now being used for the first-semester general chemistry course at Virginia Tech.

Ketan Trivedi, president and chief executive officer of the company, believes it is the first DVD of its kind in the field of education.

Trivedi, who teaches chemistry at Tech, felt there must be a better tool than a textbook to do it.

It took him and 11 other people more than three years to create it, but the interactive DVD made its debut at Tech's summer school.

"It's a great product because it's finally putting general chemistry in a medium that students prefer today," said Kurt Raver, one of the Tech students on the T2I2 team. "It has everything the textbook has."

Phil Davis, another student who helped with the project, said it makes students' computers into educational tools, "replacing the instructor almost."

The DVD contains 10 chapters. Students need not even read them as they come up on the screen, although they can do so by pushing the "mute" button. Otherwise, one of more than 80 voices does the reading.

Those voices belong to students and faculty members from the chemistry department. "Chemistry is a language. You need to hear it and a textbook cannot do that," said Trivedi.

But the screen offers more than text. Elements arrange themselves into compounds. Experiments unfold in detailed high-resolution video clips. "Unless we had a class of five students sitting around a little desk, nobody would see it as clearly as you see it here," said John Madis, T2I2's business manager.

With a click, users can pop up a calculator and a scratch pad - "For those of us from the old school," Trivedi said - to solve the nearly 500 problems on the DVD. If a student gets the wrong answer twice in a row, the real one comes up and the DVD spells out how it was reached.

Regular textbooks can't do that, said Elizabeth Ramsey, another student who works for T2I2. "You have the answer but you have no idea how to get there," she said.

Madis said the DVD allows the student to take a chance on getting the answer without the intimidation of an instructor or classmates watching. "This is like a friendly mentor-tutor that you can really feel comfortable with," he said. Earlier teaching videos generally have an instructor in front of a chalkboard talking to the viewer, he said.

Some of the T2I2 group demonstrated the DVD at a recent meeting of community college instructors in Northern Virginia, Madis said. "They were saying 'Wow!'" he said. "Almost like someone who went in and saw 'Star Wars' for the first time."

"Education has been the same for the last hundreds of years," said Herve Marand, another Tech professor who is also T2I2's vice president for educational development, "and now we have something that is totally different and they don't know how to react to it." Students can pace themselves, he said, and need not wait a week to see if they worked a test problem correctly. "Here they do it and right away, they know."

Ramsey said students agree. "They thought it was nice that they could take it home and go through it at their own pace," she said. "You can't exactly have your professor replay what he said in class."

"I wish I'd had this last year," said Amy Autorino, when she took the chemistry course. It is basic enough for those fulfilling a science requirement and detailed enough for chemistry majors, said Autorino, another student T2I2 worker.

The DVD costs about $70, while a textbook can cost $150 or more with supplemental books.

Laura Jones, one of Trivedi's students, chose the DVD over the textbook. "The practice problems were exactly what I needed to study for the test," she said. "The videos of the reactions make the DVD more interesting - and it proves that chemistry is not arbitrary equations, but actually does work."

No one in the group feels the DVD is perfect yet, so they value criticism from students who use it, said Richard Frankfurt, T2I2's vice president for technical development. "That means they're not just kissing up, they've actually looked at it," he said.

Marand said average test scores in summer school were somewhat higher among DVD users than they had been with textbook users, although that is too small a sample to prove anything. But he was impressed that students studied ahead of the classroom lectures. "They found it so exciting just to play with it," he said. "That's something that I've never heard of students doing with the book."

New River Community College is testing the DVD as a supplement to textbooks. And faculty members at Radford High School sought a grant to buy 10 of the DVDs for their use.

"The students who have tried it like it," said Wesley Adcock, chemistry instructor at the community college. "I liked it because it gives the kids a different view from what I would teach in class."

Students taking the second semester of chemistry at Tech will have to settle for textbooks during this academic year. But by next fall, Trivedi said the university will have produced a DVD for that class as well.

The DVD isn't Trivedi's first stab at using technology to teach science basics. Two years ago, lamenting the fact that many of his students lacked the basic math skills to survive his chemistry classes, he created a CD-ROM tutorial on scientific calculators that provided a crash course in statistics, calculus, logarithms and matrices.

On the Web: www.t2i2edu.com.

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