Usability of Agentsheets for creating Educational Simulation

1. Usability of Agentsheets for creating Educational Simulation Ananth Srirangarajan Sundeep Gopalaswamy Kyuhan Koh Jingren Jin Computer Science and Software Engineering Auburn University

2. Computer Assisted Learning Ananth Srirangarajan Computer Science and Software Engineering Auburn University

3. What is Computer Assisted Learning? Computer-assisted learning (CAL) is an approach to teaching and learning in which computer technology is used as an aid to the presentation, reinforcement and assessment of material to be learned, usually including a substantial interactive element.

4. Traditional Teaching vs. CAL • The traditional teaching environment is a classroom: a single teacher giving lectures to a group of students who are expected to use their notes and textbook to prepare for periodic examinations and demonstrate their mastery of the subject. • The use of computers in education shifts the focus away from the teacher to the students themselves who learn through experimentation on the computer with the teacher acting only as a guide. Difference between traditional classroom learning and Computer Assisted Learning

5. Traditional Teaching vs. CAL Differences between traditional classroom learning and Computer Assisted Learning

6. Advantages of CAL • It involves any student actively in the learning process. • It allows the learner to proceed at his own pace. • Reinforcement of learning in such situations is immediate and systematized. • The use of computers in this manner frees faculty members or training coordinators to devote more time to the personal, human considerations of their students. • CAL is very useful in the realm of remedial education.

7. Disadvantages of CAL • The need for teachers and training directors to move from accepted methods that work to a new and relatively untried method. • The diversity of computing hardware and CAL languages compete with little apparent coordination from professionals in the educational world. • The cost of hardware, CAL course materials (courseware), and individuals to help implement the process.

8. Mandatory Features in Educational Games and Simulations • Create (or recreate) a phenomena, environment or experience. • Provide an opportunity for understanding. • Be interactive (i.e. the user’s inputs must have some effect on the course of the simulation). • Follow consistent models of a theory. • Be unpredictable in their behavior, either because of in-built randomness or due to extreme sensitivity to user inputs.

9. Agentsheets Sundeep Gopalaswamy Computer Science and Software Engineering Auburn University

10. Agentsheets • Agent-based simulation-authoring tool that allows end-users to build interactive simulations and publish them as Java applets • Operations possible in Agentsheets • displaying images • computing spreadsheet-like formulas • reacting to mouse clicks and key strokes • playing sampled sounds and MIDI instruments • gathering information from web pages. • Based on grid structure and so similar to spreadsheets

11. Agentsheets • Elements of the grid are called Agents • Agents consists of: • Sensors(to detect triggers) • Effectors(to communicate with other agents) • State(condition) • Depiction(look) • Instanceof(link to the class of the agent) • Each agent is empowered to act for a client. The client, in turn, can be another agent or the user. Object Oriented Design

12. Working with Agentsheets • Each window is called “Worksheet” which is divided into grids in which agents are embedded. • Tools are provided to operate on the agents.

13. Working with Agentsheets • There is a gallery which lists all the agents and gives options to create/modify agents and their behavior and depictions. • A depiction editor tool is provided to create/modify a depiction. The option to import a image is also available.

14. Working with Agentsheets • The behavior of every agent can be defined in terms of: • Triggering event • Condition to satisfy • Action to be performed in case the condition is satisfied • Thus it is very simple to program

15. Working with Agentsheets • There are many modes of triggers such as mouse single/double click, key press, on method call, while creating the agent and so on.

16. Working with Agentsheets • There are many conditions to verify such as finding which agents are in the neighborhood, local value being set, frequency of occurrence and so on. • Each of them are categorized for ease of use.

17. Working with Agentsheets • There are many actions that can be performed such as changing ones own depictions, broadcasting messages to neighborhood, changing worksheets and so on. • This is also categorized for ease of use.

18. Psychological Approach Kyuhan Koh Computer Science and Software Engineering Auburn University

19. Education psychology • Recombination Technique • Teaching bolo, vaca, mala, and pato, Learning boca and mapa. • ‘bo’ from bolo and ‘ca’ from vaca. bo + ca = ‘boca’

20. Exclusion and stimulus equivalence • when we teach students some vocabulary, we can get good results by showing the students a picture of each object, and asking them to name it and then writing the corresponding word • Show pictures and sound the relationship between carnivore and herbivore and display text explanation

21. Model Design • Show relationship with pictures • Display relationship with text • Tell relationship with sound

22. Model Design (1)

23. Model Design (2-1)

24. Model Design (2-2)

25. Model Design (2-3)

26. Results, suggestions and conclusion Jingren Jin Computer Science and Software Engineering Auburn University

27. Result

28. Result cont’d

29. Result cont’d

30. Result cont’d

31. Result cont’d

32. Suggestions • While in "Run" state all the tools should be disabled. • The size of agent should be flexible. • Text on agent should be supported.

33. Conclusion • Experiment data • Programmer's aspecteasyeffective • Educational aspectimage + sound + text

34. REFERENCES • Aitkin, Alexander L (2004).Playing at Reality. The Australian National University . 189 -191 • Albert Ip, Iain Morrison (2001), Learning objects in different pedagogical paradigms. ASCILITE 2001 conference • Chambers, J.A., Sprecher, J.W (1980). Computer Assisted Instruction: Current Trends and Critical Issues. Communication of the ACM, 332-333. • Chwif, L., Barretto, M.R.P. (2003) Simulation Models as an Aid for the Teaching and Learning Process in Operations Management. In Proceedings of the 2003 Winter Simulation Conference, 1994-1995. • De Rose, J. C, De Souza, D. G and Hanna, E. S. (1996). Teaching reading and spelling: Exclusion and stimulus equivalence. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis. 29, 451-469. • Genesereth, M.R and Nilson, N.J.( 1987). Logical Foundations of Artificial Intelligence. Los Altos: Morgan Kaufman Publishers, Inc. . • Brouwer-Janse, M. D., Suri, J. F., Yawitz, M., de Vries, G., Fozard, J. L., and Coleman, R (1997). User interfaces for young and old. interactions, 3446 • Melchiori, L. E., de Souza, D. G., & de Rose, J. C. (2000). Reading, equivalence, and recombination of units: A replication with students with different learning histories. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 33, 97-100. • Regan, P.M., Slator, B.M (2002). Case-based Tutoring in Virtual Education Environments. In Proc. CVE 2002, ACM Press, 1-3 • Repenning A.(2000), AgentSheets®: an Interactive Simulation Environment with End-User Programmable Agents. In Proceedings of the IFIP Conference on Human Computer Interaction (INTERACT ’2000, Tokyo, Japan). • Repenning A.(1991), Creating User Interfaces with Agentsheets. In Proceedings of the 1991 IEEE Symposium on Applied Computing, Kansas City, Missouri, 191-196. • Repenning, A., and Sumner, T.(1995), Agentsheets: A Medium for Creating Domain-Oriented Visual Languages. In IEEE Computer, Vol. 28, 17-25