Not satisfied with static pictures in textbooks, BYU graduate student Andrew Teasdale engaged current technology and several other disciplines to create a better teaching method.

The immediate result is the prototype of a 27-minute videotape that takes viewers on a virtual-reality tour of Herod's Temple. The ultimate result, in Brother Teasdale's mind, is inter-active CD-ROM virtual-reality tours of many sites in religious history.His goal is to "produce materials that will assist learning through multi-media gospel study."

Brother Teasdale is just finishing the requirements for his master's degree in Near Eastern studies, which includes the video project, at BYU and has been accepted to a doctoral program in instructional design at Utah State University. He has been working under the direction of Richard D. Draper, an associate professor in the department of ancient scripture at BYU. Together, they are enthusiastic about the potential of inter-active, multi-media instruction.

"I could walk you down the streets of Nazareth in 30 A.D.," Brother Draper said, referring to the potential of computer-generated virtual reality.

"We could rebuild a carpenter's shop or visit a synagogue."

Brother Draper and Brother Teasdale consider the areas the apostle Paul visited on his missionary journeys and the Nauvoo Temple as examples of other places no longer in existence that are possibilities for computer reconstruction.

It will take time, though. To accurately recreate something on a computer is a time-consuming challenge, Brother Teasdale discovered.

He began work on the Herod's Temple project in the summer of 1994 and took more than a year to produce the prototype.

To complete the project, he had to study religion, history, art, architecture and other subjects. To make the project worthwhile, he wanted his Herod's Temple to be as close to reality as possible in dimensions, building materials, texture, lighting and perspective. He avoided the free use of artistic license. If it is seen in the video, it should be, as near as possible, what would have been seen in the actual building, he pointed out.

The goal was to give viewers a good sense of what the temple looked like when Jesus, as a young boy, was found there by His mother, when He taught His disciples there, and when He cleansed it of the moneychangers and those who bought and sold. A narration describes the temple and events that occurred there.

Brother Teasdale traveled to Israel to do research and to take photographs of such things as building stones that were scanned into his computer.

Ultimately, the Herod's Temple tour and others will be inter-active, he said. Students will be able to call the temple up on their computer and then move through it at their own pace, looking at anything they want.

He reconstructed the temple step-by-step on a computer using special software. After creating the computer model of the temple, he was able to set up a "computer camera" to behave like a real camera. It could take a picture of any part of the temple from any angle and from any distance. But unlike the instant image put on film in a real camera, the computer draws each frame individually as ordered by its "camera."

The monumental task of creating a 27-minute, animated, full-motion video can be understood by realizing that each second of video is made up of 30 individual frames.

To cope with that challenge, Brother Teasdale used the 30 computers in the Joseph Smith Building family history center overnight each night and on weekends for more than a month.

While the technology involved in making such a video is impressive, Brother Draper said the video itself is just a teaching tool.

"What we're really after, when all is said and done, is not re-creation of an ancient site," he said. "It is to allow any student of the scriptures to relate to the Savior, His apostles and His ministries."