| In Schank and Korcuska's paper on different GBS tools and architectures (Schank and Korcuska 1996), they propose that GBSs can be divided up into different classes based on the task that the student is performing in the GBS, and that one authoring tool per class will be sufficient to handle the authoring needs for all members of that class. However, consider the case where the task is that the student is managing an ongoing scenario in the world. In this task there are two different classes of learning goals. The first class of learning goals involves learning about the scenario or the domain: for example, learning what a ‘flashover’ is. The second class of learning goals involves learning how to make decisions in the management of that scenario: for example, learning what to do about a flashover. In this dissertation, I show that an authoring tool that is designed for the first set of goals (learning about the scenario) is not sufficient to handle the authoring needs of the second set of goals (learning how to make decisions in the scenario).; To this end, I describe the Crisis Management Tool, an authoring tool which allows non-programmers to create educational simulations of evolving scenarios such as fighting a house fire, managing a power plant, or giving emergency first aid to accident victims, where the set of learning goals is to learn how to manage these scenarios. The CMT provides a set of structures which allow for the construction of these ‘how-to’ simulations in a wide variety of domains, and also allows authors to build an appropriate interface to their simulation without any programming. I show how these structures necessary to build the how-to simulations are necessarily different from those necessary to build simulations where the student merely learns about the domain. Further, I show how the CMT was used in practice, and discuss the lessons learned from that use, and describe opportunities for future work. |
