A1 Refereed original research article in a scientific journal
Combining heuristics and formal methods in a tool for supporting simulation-based discovery learning
Authors: Koen Veermans, Wouter R. van Joolingen
Publisher: Springer
Publication year: 2004
Journal: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
Journal name in source: INTELLIGENT TUTORING SYSTEMS, PROCEEDINGS
Journal acronym: LECT NOTES COMPUT SC
Volume: 3220
First page : 217
Last page: 226
Number of pages: 10
ISBN: 3-540-22948-5
ISSN: 0302-9743
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-30139-4_21
This paper describes the design of a tool to support learners in simulation-based discovery learning environments. The design redesigns and extents a previous tool to overcome issues that came up in a classroom learning setting. The tool focuses on supporting learners with experimentation to identify or test hypotheses. The aim is not only to support learning domain knowledge, but also learning discovery teaming skills. For this purpose the tool uses heuristics and formal methods to assess the learners experimenting behavior, and translates this assessment into feedback directed at improving the quality of the learners discovery learning behavior. The tool is designed to be part of an authoring environment for designing simulation-based learning environments, which put some constraints on the design, but also ensures that the tool can be reused in different teaming environments. After describing the design, a learning scenario is used to serve as an illustration of the tool, and finally some concluding remarks, evaluation results, and potential extensions for the tool are presented.