Table of contents

A photocopiable literacy activity book for Key Stage 3 students in Year 9. It seeks to cover the key objectives of the Sentence Level strand of the National Literacy Strategy framework. There are over 50 pages of photocopiable activities, and minimal teacher preparation is required. Each topic section includes a lesson starter to use with the whole class (an OHP sheet, a handout or cards), a consolidation activity to reinforce the skill, and an extension activity to challenge more able pupils. There are notes for teachers. The text is part of a series in which there is one book for each year group at Key Stage 3, from Year 7 to Year 9.

This visionary and thoroughly accessible book examines how digital environments and virtual reality have altered the ways historians think and communicate ideas and how the new language of visualization transforms our understanding of the past. Drawing on familiar graphic models--maps, flow charts, museum displays, films--the author shows how images can often convey ideas and information more efficiently and accurately than words. With emerging digital technology, these images will become more sophisticated, manipulable, and multidimensional, and provide historians with new tools and environments to construct historical narratives. Moving beyond the traditional book based on linear narrative, digital scholarship based on visualization and hypertext will offer multiple perspectives, dimensions, and experiences that transform the ways historians work and people imagine and learn about history. This second edition of Computers, Visualization, and History features expanded coverage of such topics as sequential narratives, 3-D modeling, simulation, and video games, as well as our theoretical understanding of space and immersive experience. The author has also added "Guidelines for Visual Composition in History" for history and social studies teachers who wish to use technology for student assignments. Also new to the second edition is a web link feature that users of the digital edition can use to enhance visualization within the text.

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If you have ever looked at a fantastic adventure or science fiction movie, or an amazingly complex and rich computer game, or a TV commercial where cars or gas pumps or biscuits behaved liked people and wondered, “How do they do that?”, then you’ve experienced the magic of 3D worlds generated by a computer. 3D in computers began as a way to represent automotive designs and illustrate the construction of molecules. 3D graphics use evolved to visualizations of simulated data and artistic representations of imaginary worlds. In order to overcome the processing limitations of the computer, graphics had to exploit the characteristics of the eye and brain, and develop visual tricks to simulate realism. The goal is to create graphics images that will overcome the visual cues that cause disbelief and tell the viewer this is not real. Thousands of people over thousands of years have developed the building blocks and made the discoveries in mathematics and science to make such 3D magic possible, and The History of Visual Magic in Computers is dedicated to all of them and tells a little of their story. It traces the earliest understanding of 3D and then foundational mathematics to explain and construct 3D; from mechanical computers up to today’s tablets. Several of the amazing computer graphics algorithms and tricks came of periods where eruptions of new ideas and techniques seem to occur all at once. Applications emerged as the fundamentals of how to draw lines and create realistic images were better understood, leading to hardware 3D controllers that drive the display all the way to stereovision and virtual reality.

This is an open access book. Time is an exceptional dimension with high relevance in medicine, engineering, business, science, biography, history, planning, or project management. Understanding time-oriented data via visual representations enables us to learn from the past in order to predict, plan, and build the future. This second edition builds upon the great success of the first edition. It maintains a brief introduction to visualization and a review of historical time-oriented visual representations. At its core, the book develops a systematic view of the visualization of time-oriented data. Separate chapters discuss interaction techniques and computational methods for supporting the visual data analysis. Many examples and figures illustrate the introduced concepts and techniques. So, what is new for the second edition? First of all, the second edition is now published as an open-access book so that anyone interested in the visualization of time and time-oriented data can read it. Second, the entire content has been revised and expanded to represent state-of-the-art knowledge. The chapter on interaction support now includes advanced methods for interacting with visual representations of time-oriented data. The second edition also covers the topics of data quality as well as segmentation and labeling. The comprehensive survey of classic and contemporary visualization techniques now provides more than 150 self-contained descriptions accompanied by illustrations and corresponding references. A completely new chapter describes how the structured survey can be used for the guided selection of suitable visualization techniques. For the second edition, our TimeViz Browser, the digital pendant to the survey of visualization techniques, received a major upgrade. It includes the same set of techniques as the book, but comes with additional filter and search facilities allowing scientists and practitioners to find exactly the solutions they are interested in.

The very first electronic computers were invented at the end of World War II. They were very large machines that could only be used in special air conditioned rooms. Today, almost everybody carries a computer in their pocket, in their mobile phone. How did all this come about in only 70 years? This book is for people who would like to know the answer to this question. It tells this exciting story, with a lot of pictures. This book is not a complete history, rather it is a concise history that covers the most important people, companies and inventions that led to where we are today. The first chapter covers the evolution of computer hardware - the physical machine. The second chapter focuses on the software - the programs that provide the instructions that tell the hardware what to do. The third chapter covers the most important data networks that were developed so that computers could communicate with each other, ending with the Internet which only became the dominant computer network after 1995. The last chapter on Smartphones traces its history from the discovery of radio waves in the late 19th century to the Apple iPhone. This book does not require a lot of technical knowledge about computers. People who are interested in learning more about how computers actually work can read the companion book “Understanding Computers, Smartphones and the Internet”, by Ernie Dainow.