CENTRAL POINT, Oregon - At Crater High School, the only classroom computer available to math and science teacher Ed Zobel is one assembled from component parts. He has connected it to a 27-inch video monitor so that students can more easily see the screen. And that's a good thing, because nobody wants to miss the colorful images that transport them to an amazing place called Zona Land—a place where even the most complex concepts of higher math and physics finally make sense.

The product of Zobel's fertile imagination, his skills as a computer programmer, and his 28 years of teaching experience, Zona Land is a Web site that uses visual images to model and illuminate the fundamental ideas of math and science. The three-dimensional, virtual reality images give students what Zobel calls "visual scaffolding" to help them understand Newton's laws, calculus, and principles about mechanics, light, and other topics.

Students absorb the Zona Land 3D virtual images

"Textbook images are good," he allows, "but they don't move. You can't tweak them or look at them from different angles. A textbook doesn't have dials or a mouse."

For this veteran teacher the computer is proving to be a powerful teaching tool. "You won't get typical textbook learning from this," he says, but rather "a person who can visualize math and science."

Students who are struggling to understand how an x,y,z axis graph represents three-dimensional space can watch a virtual display of a ball bouncing off the three axes. Or, if they're stumped by the textbook definition of fractals, they can watch a simple "v" shape repeat until it forms a complex shape that looks like a branching tree. On many images, Zobel has built in ways for students to manipulate what they see—by "slicing" into a cone at different angles to understand geometry or compressing a spring to understand principles of energy.

Zobel invests his personal time to create the Web pages with virtual reality modeling language and software programming. The result is a site that's wonderfully easy to navigate and includes clearly written text to support the images. Many other teachers are using the site as a classroom resource.

Whether he's teaching in Zona Land or in class, however, Zobel never sugarcoats concepts as being easy to understand. "Thinking about complex ideas," he acknowledges, "is daunting. It takes effort, and the uncertainty can cause discomfort." On a day when he was explaining how movement in three dimensions can be understood by looking at a two-dimensional shadow, Zobel ended the class by saying, "I know you're leaving with your brains scrambled, but that's an OK way to be."

When students have the intellectual courage to persevere, they might eventually take what Zobel calls "the genius leap" to abstraction. And that might take time. "I hope a kid several years into college will recall a picture in his head and say, 'Ah, that's what Mr. Zobel was getting at.'"

See the Zona Land Web site*.