realized the value of comics from a literary perspective. Comic books have a lot of value for supporting struggling readers.” Students’ work can be purely creative fiction or based on issues in their communities. For instance, young adults have created comics based on the dangers of alcohol and drug abuse in their neighborhoods. “There are aspects of academic reinforcement, social awareness and character development,” Bitz said. “We’re building a bridge between a love of reading and writing.” Students also learn about technology by writing, illustrating and publishing their work using cuttingedge computer software. Bitz has published two books on the project: “When Commas Meet Kryptonite: Classroom Lessons from the Comic Book Project,” and “Manga High: Literacy, Identity, and Coming of Age in an Urban High School.”
psychology,” Frees said. “It can be used to study PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) in soldiers. When you put somebody in a 3D environment we can study their every move and see how they react to different situations.” Frees said working with colleagues from other areas of study has been a great experience. “I’ve always liked Ramapo because the College promotes collaboration,” he said. “It’s exciting to work with a variety of experts in different fields and apply computer science to those other disciplines. I’ve learned a tremendous amount.” Most of Ramapo’s human-computer interaction and virtual reality research is conducted in the College’s state-of-the-art Virtual Reality Lab. Frees, the lab’s director,
was instrumental in its creation. In 2009, he secured a National Science Foundation grant which funded the equipment for the facility. Moving forward, Frees said he hopes to continue his research on bioinformatics and genetics through the prism of virtual reality. “We’re developing tools for researchers to be able to find patterns in our genes that we can target in drug therapies,” Frees said. “There are many challenges and opportunities to explore in virtual reality. People have a hard time using virtual reality. Some people get simulator sickness. There are limitations and I think I’m going to spend a lot of time in the future working on that and trying to mitigate those problems.”
“I believe that every student has an important voice and experience that must be incorporated into the curriculum, and the Comic Book Project helps ensure those voices are heard,” Bitz said. Frees, who has been teaching at Ramapo since 2006, has fostered an interdisciplinary method of exploring how humans interact with computers and using virtual reality as part of important research projects. His work involves finding methods to make computer interaction and virtual reality more easily accessible. “It can be about how we allow users to operate a computer, such as making the interfaces intuitive enough so that the user doesn’t have to go through arcane steps to access the software,” Frees said. “That’s what human-computer interaction is all about.” Frees’ virtual reality works encompasses several disciplinary areas. These include bioinformatics (biological studies that use computer programming as part of their methodology), chemistry and psychology. “We can use virtual reality to study chemical reactions, genetics and
“ It’s exciting to work with a variety of experts in different fields and apply computer science to those other disciplines. I’ve learned a tremendous amount.” SCOTT FREES
www.ramapo.edu
7