Efficiency Gains

Animated maps, scrolling timelines that drive events across the map, and other interactive widgets, all designed with pedagogy in mind, enable students to efficiently understand the base material.   This efficiency gain allows them to focus more time and intellectual capacity on high-level analysis and evaluation.

Full Spectrum Learning

Students click and touch widgets, listen to audio interviews, watch animations and videos, and read the author’s text.  By engaging multiple senses and regularly alternating between sensory requirements, The West Point History of Warfare keeps students engaged, reduces reader’s fatigue, and improves retention.

Time-Space Comprehension

Cadets can view an animated map of a battle or event across its entire space and time rather than having only a few discrete moments at their disposal and having to conjecture what occurred in between.  Scrolling timelines that drive events across the map capture the relationship between space and time in a way that a traditional text cannot.

Curated Primary Sources

Photographs, cartoons, works of art, video clips, and primary source text  immerse students in the period they are studying.  Moreover, these primary sources are digitally curated with “hot-spotting” technology.  For example, students can touch key visuals in a political cartoon or work of art to learn more about the symbolism and political context. 

A Learning Ecosystem

Students wielding tablets or notebook computers in classrooms equipped with televisions or projectors can participate in the classroom experience like never before.  In many cases, a teacher demonstrating his or her tablet on a television can seamlessly pass control of the television to student devices.  Moreover, the third party apps can be used to further enhanced the experience by, for example, drawing on the screen (telestrating) to visually aid explanations.

Learning Outside the Classroom

When students have their textbook on a tablet or notebook computer, they take it with them everywhere they go.  They will read it while standing in line or riding a bus.  Busy students can more easily find time to get through an assigned reading that might otherwise have gone unread.  What’s more, the efficiency gains in understanding and retention mean that students will arrive in class prepared for higher-level discourse.

Rich Meta-Data

In addition to a fully searchable glossary of key terms, The West Point History of Warfare has also been tagged for recurring themes.  A student writing a paper courage or fear in battle can search for all the sections that have been tagged with these themes.

Rigorous Scholarship

Extensive endnotes guide readers to the sources, primary and secondary--in many cases with hyperlinks giving readers direct access to the texts cited.