Test Screens

After choosing where to go, students go to a new location where they can gather information. A test screen is where students can probe their environment and get new information that wasn't in the introduction that will help them in their investigation.

In Volcano, after seeing the cut-scene video, students are given a test screen. A test screen has the following parts, labeled in Figure 2.11.

  

Figure 2.11: Four parts of the experiment screen: Work area, notebook, toolbar, and the question area.

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• Work area: The work area has some sort of physical object on which students can run tests and also a place to report test results. In the case of the thermometer, it is a matter of picking up the thermometer from the toolbar (see below), dipping it in the lake (clicking on it), and reading the result. For other test-like situations, such as viewing the crater, the test results appear in the notebook as soon as they see the testing screen--the testing process requires no extra action.

• Notebook: Each time a test is run, it adds evidence points, usually a line of text preceded by a bullet, to the notebook. The notebook contains a running log of each piece of information students glean from their work. These evidence points are all scenario-specific--they are information about this particular fictional volcano the student is working on.

• Toolbar: These are where the tools to run the tests are found. Pedagogically, picking up these ``tools'' and clicking on the appropriate part of the screen isn't vital to the true teaching goal of the program (to teach volcanology and general geology), but it is educational to learn which kinds of tests are performed at which kinds of sites. For example, when students are looking at a lake near a volcano, they can do two kinds of lake tests, while at a fumarole site other sorts of tests are available.

  The tools in the toolbar serve another important purpose: it's fun to use them. A GBS is about doing, so it is important to make students feel like they're actually interacting with the environment and also to entertain them with interesting ways of presenting results. Just looking at a piece of paper with a list of temperatures on it, although possibly closer to a flown-in USGS expert's job, isn't nearly as much fun as taking a temperature yourself.

• Question area: This is for just-in-time help. The list of questions available changes in response to nearly every click in the GBS. Each time a student does something in the test site, a new set of questions appear that are supposed to be predictive of the kinds of questions students might have. For instance, when the student first arrives at the site, they are greeted with this list of questions:

  • What should I be looking for at the lake?

  • How do I measure the temperature and the acidity of the lake?

  • Can a lake near a volcano be dangerous?

  Followup questions include:

  • Why measure the acidity of the lake?

  • Why measure the temperature of the lake?

  Each question button that appears on the side of the screen can be clicked to show an expert media item, typically a movie of a ``talking head'' expert but occasionally a set of slides with a voice over, a diagram, or a small segment of text. After these answers play, another set of questions appear underneath the video box which are followups to that question. For example, if the answer talks about magma near the surface, one of the followups might be ``What is magma?'' Students can continue to follow followups as far as they are interested or find them useful. This kind of network of questions, answers, and followup questions is called an ASK system [Osgood 1994].

  For a general questions about geology like ``What is magma?'' the student is automatically taken to the ``Research volcanoes'' section of the GBS, described below under ``Expert help.''