The 28th IPP Symposium

The Exploratories Project

Jean Laleuf, Brown CS Graphics Group

For seven years, the Exploratories project has been working on building exploratories-highly interactive microworlds for exploring domains-to teach computer science, mathematics and engineering. Advances in technology have facilitated the distribution and presentation of these materials, but the construction of the underlying software has remained a daunting task. The difficulties encountered are only compounded by the emergence of new domains and a rapidly changing workforce of undergraduate students. What we'd like-but have had trouble producing-are repositories of successful, reusable components to serve as building-blocks for future construction.

In this talk, I present our component framework for building educational microworlds. I briefly explain why this problem is hard and why existing frameworks aren't up to the task, but why we think that we've finally gotten it right. Our components have all been used to build microworlds for Brown's introductory computer graphics course and have recently been made publicly available for use at other institutions. Some of our microworlds will be on demo during the lunch break and late afternoon reception. Come by and play with them!