Mississippi State University professor Dr. Gary Bradshaw uses technology to teach psychology on his interactive Web site, e-Psych.
Bradshaw, along with Dr. Nancy McCarley and Dr. B. Michael Thorne, were recently awarded the Frank Costin Memorial Award of Excellence at the 25th annual meeting of the National Institute on the Teaching of Psychology for a poster describing the Web site.
Bradshaw, who began developing the site five years ago, said he first got the idea for the Web site while working on a similar Web site for the University of Illinois.
“When I moved here, I got money from the National Science Foundation to develop the e-Psych site,” Bradshaw said.
Bradshaw said he wanted to teach classic psychology in a new way.
“We’re trying to teach people about psychology using a very different instructional delivery system,” Bradshaw said. “In particular, computers allow for a lot of interactive graphically-oriented modes of presentation. That’s something that’s very hard to do in a classroom or in a textbook.”
The site features a number of guides on an interactive tour of various branches of psychology. The guides range from a blue-skinned alien representation of Albert Einstein to a cowboy describing depth of field as an equation.
Bradshaw is developing the biological mind and said he hopes to add more to the adaptive mind in the near future. His favorite part of the site so far is the optical illusions of the “motile mountains” in the descriptive psychology branch of the site.
“You get to see a lot of detailed illusions that you can’t really experience any other way,” Bradshaw said.
Experience e-Psych at http://epsych.msstate.edu.