Teachers as simulation programmers

Mary Beth Rosson, Cheryl D. Seals
2001 Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems - CHI '01  
Five public school teachers were observed during two selfstudy sessions where they learned to use Visual AgenTalk (VAT). The first session emphasized the basic visual programming skills, while the second introduced ways to reuse existing simulations. Two versions of the reuse tutorial were developed, one offering a concrete example world for reuse, and the second an abstract world. During their learning and reuse sessions, the teachers thought out loud as they worked, enabling a detailed
more » ... s of their goals, reactions, problems, and successes. After each session, the teachers also completed user reaction questionnaires. Although all teachers succeeded in learning the basics of VAT, they varied considerably in their reuse of the example simulations. It appears that the simplified components of the abstract world supported reuse to a greater degree than those of the concrete example world.
doi:10.1145/365024.365109 dblp:conf/chi/RossonS01 fatcat:hzrarrgbznf3ths4c5e7a4l7dy