INDIE GBS architecture

To show the range of features a typical INDIE GBS has, this section will briefly show the kind of interaction most authors have in their applications. As mentioned above, INDIE builds applications where students in the role of an expert practitioner collect information by running tests on some environment where some information is hidden. An example is Volcano Investigator, where middle-school students are put in the role of a geologist for the United States Geological Service who is called in to decide whether or not a volcano (which threatens the lives of thousands of residents) is likely to erupt.

  

Figure 1.2: Running a test in Volcano Investigator.

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Most INDIE GBSes follow the same rough course of action:

• Problem selection/Introduction: Students choose which problem they want to work on from an array of available problems. In Volcano^2.1, students are brought to the mountain they need to diagnose at the start of each case.

• Investigate: Students choose what tests they would like to perform and see their results. In Volcano, for example, they run specific geological tests on the volcano such as measuring the acidity of nearby lakes and looking at the change in content of the gases spewing out from the tops of the volcano. The results of these tests (and others) indicate whether or not the volcano will erupt.

• Question: Naturally, students aren't experts in fields like volcanology when they start. They don't know what information they need to know to make their diagnosis, how they go about finding it, and how to interpret the new information once they get it. To help them, students are given access to experts, usually real-world experts captured in digital video. Students get a chance to ask questions to them in the form of an ASK system [Osgood 1994] which is available all the time. The questions students can ask are contextualized against what problems currently face the students. For example, if students are faced with the results of a seismology test, they can ask experts what seismology data indicate a volcano is going to erupt, how seismology works, or even why volcanoes erupt in the first place.

• Build case: Once students have investigated the crisis by running tests, they make one or more claims about the situation. This is done by sorting the evidence students have found out from the tests into categories, deciding if they support or disconfirm a list of claims. Volcano's claims are simple: The mountain will erupt immediately, the mountain will erupt in the near future, or the mountain is unlikely to erupt.

• Remediation: The application then responds to reports that the students build with a critique of the students' work. Critiques address misconceptions (such as misinterpreting test results), omissions (forgetting to include relevant test results), and other kinds of mistakes students might make. For example, Volcano will direct students who focus on surface, visual features of volcanoes to more scientific tests.

• Wrap-up: Eventually, students make a correct and well-supported diagnosis (or more than one diagnosis, depending on the domain). At this point, the program shows students a wrap-up and a summary of what they learned and did in the program, and then allows the student to work on a new scenario.

A more complete discussion of Volcano and other INDIE projects, including summaries and screenshots of several completed INDIE applications, can be found in Chapter 2.