James C. Spohrer

KidSim: programming agents without a programming language

oftware agents are our besf hope during the 1990s for obtaining more power and utility from personal computers. Agents have the potential to partiti

Learner-centered education

xzte nrtively in accomplishing tasks, rather than serving as passive tools as do today’s applications. However, people do not want generic agents-they want help with lhtir jobs, their tasks, their goals. Agents must be flexible enough to be tailored to each individual. The most flexible way to tailor a software entity is to program it. The problem is that programming is too difficult for most people today. Consider:

Authoring intelligent multimedia applications: finding familiar representations for expressing knowledge

There is a revolution taking place in education, one that deals with the philosophy of how one teaches, of the relationship between teacher and student, of the way in which a classroom is structured, and the nature of curriculum. At the heart is a powerful pedagogy, one that has been developing over the past hundred years. It embraces social issues, the culture of the classroom, life-long learning concerns, and perhaps both last and least, technology.

Content=knowledge+media: content acquisition, maintenance, communication, and construction for intelligent tutoring systems

Examines some of the reasons why the task of developing intelligent multimedia applications is so complex. The authors describe some ideas being explored in an effort to reduce the complexity of this software development task. There are significant barrier preventing nonprogrammers or occasional programmers from rapidly prototyping intelligent multimedia applications. A perspective is presented on why this barrier exists and how the barrier might be overcome. Two prototypes of task-specific knowledge acquisition minitools are discussed. The first minitool presents a way nonprogrammers might author a knowledge base that allows a spatial structure to be browsed. The second minitool presents a way occasional programmers might author troubleshooting procedures for a device. The minitools provide domain experts with representations (i.e., spatial maps and decision trees) that are more familiar than frames and rules.<<ETX>>

Apple Computer's Authoring Tools & Titles R&D Program

Developers of intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) and other types of knowledge-based learner support and performance support systems have traditionally faced a variety of problems acquiring, maintaining, communicating, and helping learners to construct knowledge. The authors review some of these traditional problems in the development of ITSs, and then reconsider them from the broader perspective of content. They explore the notion of content (i.e., knowledge+media) and its implications for developers of ITSs. A few of the problems that arise in content-rich systems which combine knowledge and media are presented.<<ETX>>

Pins, grooves, and sockets: a direct manipulation interface to a graphical constraint system

This site description reports on four projects that are part of Apple Computer’s Authoring Tools & Titles R&D Program. Our charter is to empower people to build, extend, and maintain interactive multimedia software by lowering barriers to entry for non-programmers and improving the productivity of professional programmers. In addition, we partner with design teams to create software titles that illustrate the potential of intelligent multimedia applications, especially in the areas of education and training.

How to make "complex" software customizable

Introduction Graphic-al constraint systems have proven to be powerful tools for specifying the behavior of interfaee objects ll10RNING77, SUTHERLAND43, GLEICHER91, LINCAGES92]. However, these systems have been plagued by the lack of a user interface that can allow authors to quickly and easily produce the graphical widgets they desire. This paper reports on a user intetfaee metaphor of pins, grooves, and sockets (FG&S) for dealing with certain types of constraints.

System and method for enhancing a user interface with a computer based training tool

KidSim and Puppeteer are two authoring tools that allow non-programmers to create and customize interactive educational simulations. KidSim and Puppeteer illustrate the effectiveness of task specific authoring tools as an approach to making complex software that is customizable. In this paper, a brief description of these two task specific tools is provided, and then enabling technology for building task specific tools is discussed.<<ETX>>