Kevin Harris' sixth grade class has a mission; they need to find out why there are more red flowers in certain areas of a large field. Mr. Harris breaks up the class into groups to explore different parts of the field. When the children come upon a flower, they place a flag in the ground to mark the spot and record its position and colour using a pocket PC that doubles as a Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver. They do all of this at an ImmersaDesk/sup TM/ in their school. Once all of the data is collected, the students meet as a group in their classroom to integrate and visualize it. Patterns that are not visible while collecting the data suddenly appear when that data is visualized as a whole. Using MyWorld, a geographic information system for high-school students, filters are applied to the data to make the patterns more obvious. This collaboration combines the VR educational work at the University of Illinois at Chicago with the desktop educational work at Northwestern University. It is part of a larger NSF funded project including the University of Michigan and Georgia Tech developing guidelines and an engineering process to support software developers in building effective computer-based learning environments.

A great deal of effort has gone into developing open-ended inquiry activities for science education as well as complex computer tools for accessing scientific data to help students learn science.To be successful with these tools and activities, students need to learn a set of inquiry skills and to develop a new mode of classroom work reflective inquiry.In this paper we describe the design of the Progress Portfolio, a software environment to promote reflective inquiry, and we examine the influences of the unique practices and features of classroom contexts on our design process.K@ywOrdS

Article Free Access Share on National Geographic unplugged: classroom-centered design of interactive nature films Authors: Brian K. Smith MIT Media Laboratory, 20 Ames Street, E15-313, Cambridge, MA MIT Media Laboratory, 20 Ames Street, E15-313, Cambridge, MAView Profile , Brian J. Reiser School of Education and Social Policy, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL School of Education and Social Policy, Northwestern University, Evanston, ILView Profile Authors Info & Claims CHI '98: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing SystemsJanuary 1998 Pages 424–431https://doi.org/10.1145/274644.274702Online:01 January 1998Publication History 18citation528DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations18Total Downloads528Last 12 Months19Last 6 weeks3 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteeReaderPDF

Nature documentaries play an important role in high school biology classrooms, yet they deliver a passive and biased account of the behavior of organisms.To engage students in more active problem solving around behavioral topics, we created an interactive video system called Animal Landlord.Part of a week-long curriculum designed to introduce concepts in behavioral ecology, Animal Landlord presents film clips of the Serengeti lion hunting its prey.Students select and annotate video frames with explanations of their significance to the hunt, compare annotations across films, and ultimately genera!ize a qualitative model of predation behaviors.This paper discusses the motivations for changing the nature of documentary use in the classroom, the ways in which we change the form of traditional narration for pedagogical purposes, and the interactivity that emerges in the social context of the classroom.P@SoJlnl Or dJJW'OOJl1 lJ.'X iS gmrllcd willJout I& provided trJnt tl,e copis arc Jlot Ill& or distrihkd lbr prolit or coJJlJnw&t ndvnJJt;Jp.tllc copYm ridit IlOtiC% thr: titk O~'lhr pblicaliun :Jnd its date apP&lr.;,Jld Jlotic-is SiVeJJ tht CoPYright is bY pcnJlisioJJ ol'llrz ACM.IJJc.To COPY otjJm&q to reWJbl& to post 011 SWve~s or 10 redistribute to lists.rqJir= sP&fic peniiissioJi nndlor fee.

We describe an intelligent tutor for programming embedded in a graphical programming language. The tutor monitors students' problem solving and provides feedback and guidance. Explanations are generated from the content of the ideal model's problem solving rules. The graphical interface is designed to facilitate the acquisition of causal models of programming. Students work in a medium that corresponds to their planning operations. The interface enables forward and backward chaining, thus conveying the structure of the planning more effectively than a text-based interface. The interface also provides a graphical record of the solution history and current goals.