PIDoc: Wiki style Literate Programming for Prolog

This document introduces PlDoc, a literate programming system for Prolog. Starting point for PlDoc was minimal distraction from the programming task and maximal immediate reward, attempting to seduce the programmer to use the system. Minimal distraction is achieved using structured comments that are as closely as possible related to common Prolog documentation practices. Immediate reward is provided by a web interface powered from the Prolog development environment that integrates searching and browsing application and system documentation. When accessed from localhost, it is possible to go from documentation shown in a browser to the source code displayed in the user's editor of choice.Comment: Paper presented at the 17th Workshop on Logic-based Methods in Programming Environments (WLPE2007

Automating the analysis of problem-solving activities in learning environments: the co-lab case study

The analysis of problem-solving activities carried out by students in learning settings involves studying the students' actions and assessing the solutions they have created. This analysis constitutes an ideal starting point to support an automatic intervention in the student activity by means of feedback or other means to help students build their own knowledge. In this paper, we present a model-driven framework to facilitate the automation of this problemsolving analysis and of providing feedback. This framework includes a set of authoring tools that enable software developers to specify the analysis process and its intervention mechanisms by means of visual languages. The models specified in this way are computed by the framework in order to create technological support to automate the problem-solving analysis. The use of the framework is illustrated thanks to a case study in the field of System Dynamics where problem-solving practices are analysed.The Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia (España) has partially supported this research under Project TIN2011-29542-C02-02. The authors would like to express their gratitude to Ton de Jong, Wouter R. van Joolingen and Sylvia van Borkulo (University of Twente), for supporting this research. The work reported here was done during Rafael Duque’s stay at the Department of Instructional Technology of the University of Twente

Supporting learners’ experiment design

Inquiry learning is an educational approach in which learners actively construct knowledge and in which performing investigations and conducting experiments is central. To support learners in designing informative experiments we created a scaffold, the Experiment Design Tool (EDT), that provided learners with a step-by-step structure to select variables and to assign values to these variables, together with offering built-in heuristics for experiment design. To further structure the students’ approach, the EDT was offered within a set of detailed research questions which again were grouped under a set of broader research questions. Learning results for learners who worked with the EDT were compared to results for learners in two control conditions. In the first control condition, learners received only the detailed research questions and not the EDT; in the second control condition, learners received only the limited set of general research questions. In all conditions, learners conducted their experiments in an online learning environment about the physics topic of Archimedes’ principle. Conceptual knowledge was measured before and after the intervention using parallel forms of a knowledge test. Overall results showed significant learning gains in all three conditions, but no significant differences between conditions. However, learners who started with low prior knowledge showed a significantly higher learning gain in the EDT condition than in the two control conditions. This result indicates that the effect of providing learners with scaffolds does not follow a “one-size-fits-all” principle, but may depend on specific learner characteristics, such as prior knowledge

CML: the commonKADS conceptual modelling language

We present a structured language for the specification of knowledge models according to the CommonKADS methodology. This language is called CML (Conceptual Modelling Language) and provides both a structured textual notation and a diagrammatic notation for expertise models. The use of our CML is illustrated by a variety of examples taken from the VT elevator design system

Examining the added value of the use of an experiment design tool among secondary students when experimenting with a virtual lab

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