Anne Morgan Spalter

Interactive color palette tools

Color is one of the basic building blocks of image creation, yet many computer-based methods for selecting and working with colors remain unchanged from the time of their invention two decades ago. Although some advanced color tools are available for specific tasks, such as color correction, virtually none exist to help users select a set of colors and work with them effectively. The authors tool set extends graphics applications ability to mix and organize colors; explore color combinations; and solicit historical, theoretical, or expert sources.

A component repository for learning objects: a progress report

We believe that an important category of SMET digital library content will be highly interactive, explorable microworlds for teaching science, mathematics, and engineering concepts. Such environments have proved extraordinarily time-consuming and difficult to produce, however, threatening the goals of widespread creation and use. One proposed solution for accelerating production has been the creation of repositories of reusable software components or learning objects. Programmers would use such components to rapidly assemble larger-scale environments. Although many agree on the value of this approach, few repositories of such components have been successfully created. We suggest some reasons for the lack of expected results and propose two strategies for developing such repositories. We report on a case study that provides a proof of concept of these strategies. repositories. We report on a case study that provides a proof of concept of these strategies. contributions from a more diverse audience, including especially those who have substantial classroom and pedagogical expertise but lack programming expertise. It also promotes the extraction of content from software so that collections may be better organized and more easily repurposed to meet the needs of a diverse audience of educators and students.

Considering a full range of teaching techniques for use in interactive educational software: a practical guide and brainstorming session

The paper addresses a moment in the design of educational software that is crucial and yet often unrecognized and unexploited: the moment when the designers decide what traditional teaching techniques (and related pedagogies) will be used. In our experience, this decision is often reached without due consideration of the alternatives, with the result that many educational modules tend to approach their subject matter in the same few ways, e.g., an interactive visualization of an algorithm or physical process. Our goal is not to recommend one teaching approach over another, but to reinforce awareness of the breadth of choice that is available. To that end, we have selected thirteen common teaching techniques that are particularly appropriate for interactive software and describe them in a traditional context and in terms of their potential online incarnations.

Problems with using components in educational software

Abstract Reuse is vital in the education world because the time and money necessary to create high-quality educational software is a significant problem. Estimates for the cost of creating a single well-designed, highly graphical and interactive online course in the commercial domain range from several hundred thousand dollars to a million or more. Thus, the idea of reusable software components that can be shared easily is tremendously appealing. In fact, “component” has become a buzzword in the educational software community, with millions of dollars from the National Science Foundation and other sponsors funding a wide variety of “component-based” projects. But few, if any, of these projects have approached the grand vision of creating repositories of easy-to-reuse components for developers and educators. This paper investigates some of the factors that stand in the way of achieving this goal. It also looks forward to a new genre of educational software that we hope will emerge when the basic components problems have been addressed. We begin by defining the word “component” and looking at several projects using components, with a focus on our Exploratories project at Brown University. We then discuss challenges in: critical mass, intellectual property issues, platform and system specificity, programming in the university environment, quality assurance, searching and metadata, and social issues. We look at relevant software engineering issues and describe why we believe educational applications have unique factors that should be considered when using components.

Reusable hypertext structures for distance and JIT learning

in res sto of athe ABSTRACT Software components for distance and just-in-time (JIT) learning are an increasingly common method of encouraging reuse and facilitating the development process[58], but no analogous efforts have been made so far for designing hypertext components that can be reused in educational offerings.1 We argue that such structures will be of tangible benefit to the online learning community, serving to offload a substantial burden from programmers and designers of software, as well as allowing educators without any programming experience to customize available online resources.

Interaction in an IVR Museum of Color: Constructivism Meets Virtual Reality

Immersive Virtual Reality (IVR) environments would seem naturally to lend themselves to hands-on approaches to learning, but the success of such virtual direct experience depends heavily on the design of interface and interaction techniques. IVR presents surprisingly difficult interface challenges, and the study of interface and interaction design for educational IVR use is just beginning. In this paper, the authors discuss three issues encountered in the creation of an IVR-based educational project: the use of architectural spaces for structuring a sequence of modules, the tradeoffs between metaphorical fidelity and convenience, and the use of IVR in interaction with visualizations of abstract concepts.

The graphics teaching tool for non-technical students

Just as basic grammar skills underlie writing in all fields and basic math skills underlie virtually all the sciences, so an understanding of computer graphics fundamentals is becoming a basic “literacy” requirement for a wide range of tasks in IT-based jobs and beyond, from graphics and industrial design to engineering and business. George Lucas has said,“If students aren’t taught the language of images, shouldn’t they be considered as illiterate as if they left college without being able to read or write?” [Daly 2004]. The Graphics Teaching Tool (GTT) is a Java-based program designed to address this need for graphics concepts literacy by offering a pedagogicallydriven, constructivist environment for non-Computer Science majors. It has been used in a university course on visual literacy and aims to be integrated into courses from business to multimedia to Web design.