INDIE fills a unique role in the realm of educational software building tools. What other systems are similar to INDIE?
INDIE was designed to build a superset of the applications GBSB (mentioned above) could build. Aside from GBSB, there are other GBS tools that build other classes of GBSes besides investigate-and-decide. Run [Towle 1998] deals with running an organization over time while Advise [Herman 1998] covers giving recommendations in a nuanced domain like foreign policy. Run and Advise don't support the same interactions as INDIE.
Outside the Institute for Learning Sciences, there are other kinds
of
investigation/claim-building software. These include programs like
Belvedere [Toth et al. 1997, Paolucci, Suthers, and Weiner 1996] or
ACE [Sleeman and Hendley 1982], where students are trying to come up with an
explanation for some phenomenon, such as why the dinosaurs died or why
there is a spike in a particular nuclear magnetic resonance graph.
Although these programs support many of the same interactions as INDIE
(and even very similar subject matter), most of these systems are
either difficult to author or have a very limited set of responses the
system can give. Many rely on humans to critique student claims,
which defeats many of the advantages of computers as vessels of
education.
Lastly, a large part of INDIE is its interface builder. There are several commercially available interface building programs that are more or less accessible to non-programmers; Supercard [Allegiant 1994] and Macromedia Director [Macromedia 1998] are two. They certainly help authors lay out interfaces but aren't complete tools. To take an interface specification in Supercard and really implement a full GBS with hundreds or thousands of interacting parts would be very difficult and labor-intensive.
Thus, INDIE is designed to fill a ``hole'' in the educational software production landscape--providing a means for non-programmers to build investigate-and-decide GBSes. Our user evaluation, described below, will show that INDIE succeeded at this mission.