Designing interactive learning environments (ILEs; e.g., intelligent tutoring systems, educational games, etc.) is a challenging interdisciplinary process that needs to satisfy multiple stakeholders. ILEs need to function in real educational settings (e.g., schools) in which a number of goals interact. Several instructional design methodologies exist to help developers address these goals. However, they often lead to conflicting recommendations. Due to the lack of an established methodology to resolve such conflicts, developers of ILEs have to rely on ad-hoc solutions. We present a principled methodology to resolve such conflicts. We build on a well-established design process for creating Cognitive Tutors, a highly effective type of ILE. We extend this process by integrating methods from multiple disciplines to resolve design conflicts. We illustrate our methodology's effectiveness by describing the iterative development of the Fractions Tutor, which has proven to be effective in classroom studies with 3,000 4th-6th graders.

Time is a difficult concept for parents to communicate with young children. We developed TimeBlocks, a novel tangible, playful object to facilitate communication about concepts of time with young children. TimeBlocks consists of a set of cubic blocks that function as a physical progress bar. Parents and children can physically manipulate the blocks to represent the concept of time. We evaluated TimeBlocks through a field study in which six families tried TimeBlocks for four days at their homes. The results indicate that TimeBlocks played a useful role in facilitating the often challenging task of time-related communication between parents and children. We also report on a range of observed insightful novel uses of TimeBlocks in our study.

Although a solid understanding of fractions is foundational in mathematics, the concept of fractions remains a challenging one. Previous research suggests that multiple graphical representations (MGRs) may promote learning of fractions. Specifically, we hypothesized that providing students with MGRs of fractions, in addition to the conventional symbolic notation, leads to better learning outcomes as compared to instruction incorporating only one graphical representation. We anticipated, however, that MGRs would make the students' task more challenging, since they must link the representations and distill from them a common concept or principle. Therefore, we hypothesized further that self-explanation prompts would help students benefit from working with MGRs. To investigate these hypotheses, we conducted a classroom study in which 112 6th-grade students used intelligent tutors for fraction conversion and fraction addition. The results of the study show that students learned more with MGRs of fractions than with a single representation, but only when prompted to self-explain how the graphics relate to the symbolic fraction representations.