By N.V.

Full marks to Apple for devising ways to improve how science, mathematics and other topics are taught in primary and secondary schools across America. The company’s “Reinventing Textbooks” event last week showed how effectively Apple’s popular iPad tablet computer can replace the stack of tedious, and invariably outdated, textbooks that school children have to lug around these days (see “A textbook manoeuvre”, January 19th 2012). 

Apple is providing a free Macintosh application, dubbed iBooks Author, which allows publishers, teachers and writers to produce interactive textbooks with video, audio and even rotating 3D graphics that spring to life with the touch of a finger. By and large, interactive multimedia offer more engaging explanations that students more readily grasp and remember. To play such books on an iPad, a free application called iBooks 2 must first be downloaded from the company’s App Store. Interactive textbooks can then be purchased from iTunes, Apple's online store, for $15 apiece or less. That is a seventh of the price of the average textbook used in schools today.

No question that interactive textbooks deliver results. A pilot study carried out for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, a textbook publisher based in Boston, compared the performance of two groups of children over the course of a year at the Amelia Earhart Middle School in Riverside, California. A control group used the traditional Holt McDougal Algebra 1 textbook, while an experimental group used iPads with an interactive version of the same coursework. At the end of the year, 78% of pupils using the interactive text scored “proficient” or “advanced” on the California algebra test, compared with only 59% scoring likewise with the standard textbook