Working-, Doing- or Learning-Environments

Designing Dynamical Learning Environments for Simulation: Micro-Worlds & Applets on the World Wide Web

Dr. ir. Rik Min
researcher / designer
Ir. Jan de Goeijen
developer / software engineer

Faculty of Educational Science and Technology (EDTE), University of Twente (UT)
Postbus 217; 7500 AE Enschede, The Netherlands. E-mail: Min@edte.utwente.nl

http://users.edte.utwente.nl/min

Abstract

A student today no longer spends his time in a lonely little attic room, a noisy lecture room or the deadly silence in the huge reading room of a university library. These components of his environment still exist but their functionality has changed. Essentielly all students at the campus of the University of Twente (UT) have an excellent connection with the World Wide Web. The web is extremely popular, both among lecturers and students. It fills the almost natural need of young people to want to travel all over the world and to try and understand texts and have fun with games and simulations (micro-worlds). All this at minimum cost. At our faculty we have developed a new serie of practical courses around JavaScript and two libraries with special Java-applets: from very easy to use to complex. So our students have the posssiblities to learn on a realtive easy way designing and developing learning- and instruction-environments with complex intelligent modules. We combine these courses with our research & development-projects so our students can redesgn some components. This poster will discuss our products, our libraries, our courses, our research and our hypotheses.

Pilot projects

During the past academic year we have conducted pilot studies into the possibilities and the 'performance' (i.e. the 'strength' or the 'power') of HTML, javascript and Java: the 'WebLib'-project and the 'SimLib'-project. In particular for on-line learning environments for simulation and problem solving in front of a computer monitor. A number of different interactive on-line examples have been developed and a number of different on-line tests have been created. This research has let to educational applications.