Assignment 4Type your name(s) here:John Lansing-Gary Knoll Briefly discuss the following issues for the paper that you have read: 1. what did you find 1.1. interesting about the article? We were impressed by the EDC. John had used AgentSheets but had never seen this application of the technology. We liked the integration of physical and virtual objects. We think this concept would be very helpful in teaching children. Lastly we thought there was a great benefit to working in a dynamic setting, where changes are quite simple to make. This allows for many perspectives to be seen easily. As a side note we thought the action and reflection was interesting and true. 1.2. not interesting about the article? Over all we found the article interesting; however some of the conceptual writing previous to the introduction of the EDC was uninteresting because it was out of context. Once the concepts were used in reference to the EDC they became more interesting to us. 2. what do you consider the main message of the article? We found a few main ideas in this paper which included contextualizing information and discovery learning. It also had some underlying ideas about the role of computational media in design processes. 3. are themes discussed in the article which you would like to know more about? Due to the lack of full understanding of the portion on Symmetry of Ignorance we would like further information. We were also interested in the early stages of development of the EDC. 4. what did you find interesting about the “EDC” system? We were impressed by the ability of the EDC to map physical objects into virtual ones. This is a very powerful mechanism that can help people that are not very familiar with computers to do simple programming. 5. do you know of other papers, ideas, and systems which are closely related to the article and the “EDC” system? John has used AgentSheets which he describes as a visual programming system that is aimed to make simple games/simulations easy for non-programmers. (John was introduced to this program by Professors Clayton Lewis and Alexander Repenning at CU) Gary has seen nothing else like the EDC. 6. what do the article and the associated system say about 6.1. design In the views of this paper things should be designed with the Open System concept in that it can easily evolve to changing problems. The design should have this goal from the beginning of design stages. 6.2. learning This article talked about learning in the discovery learning or learning on demand context. In that you will be more interested and will actually learn if it is important to the person in the real world context. 6.3. collaboration The article uses collaboration as a means to bring together the knowledge of multiple people to solve a common problem. With collaboration one person will not need to learn every detail of another person’s expertise and experience in the problem domain. 6.4. innovative media to support these activities? Innovative media can greatly enrich the learning experience by offering several ways to visualize problems and solutions. The EDC appeared to allow for quick trial and error with immediate results, this is helpful in brain storming. 7. do you have any ideas how this research could / should be extended (based on your own knowledge and experience)? We had trouble thinking of new areas to extend the research, however we do feel that if an application for young people was created it would potentially increase collaborative skills and methods over time. It would also be interesting to see the effects of a system like this throughout a child's education as a function of how early the method of learning was introduced to the child.
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