Building Your Own Simulation Tool And Using It Too

Dr. Roland Hubscher
Edu Tech Institute and College of Computing
Georgia Institute of Technology

Monday, March 17, 1997
11 a.m. - 12 noon
Fuller Labs 320

Educational software is being developed at a high rate, yet it is not always clear what the educational value is. Does the use of the software result in a deeper conceptual understanding? Does it improve the students' meta knowledge relevant for problem solving? Can the software be integrated into a classroom at all? I have built Cartoonist, a learning environment for kids to create their own graphical simulations using a visual programming language. The rule-based visual programming language has interesting properties: it is declarative and thus, can use negation in the right-hand-side; complex behaviors can be composed from simple visual descriptions; and a wide range of parallel behaviors can be described. But does Cartoonist fulfill all the requirements of a useful educational software environment? Answering this question will suggest several research issues that need to be followed up if simulations want to have a major positive feedback in the classroom and for end-users of all ages in general.

Maintained by webmaster@wpi.edu
Last modified: Sep 27, 2006, 16:05 EDT