Articulate Virtual Laboratories
for Science and Engineering Education
Sponsor: Applications of Advanced Technology Program, National Science
Foundation
Principal Investigator: Kenneth D. Forbus
Project Summary: The goal of this project is to develop articulate
virtual laboratories (AVLs) that teach science and engineering principles
by scaffolding and coaching students in conceptual design tasks. The educational
conjecture we are testing is that articulate virtual laboratories will
enable students to (a) learn fundamental principles radically better than
they would otherwise and (b) succeed at design tasks that they would otherwise
be unable to perform. To test these conjectures, our prototype laboratories
will be used by engineering undergraduates from Northwestern University
and Oxford University as part of their course work, and by high school
students from Evanston Township High School.
We believe that articulate virtual laboratories could dramatically improve
engineering and science education. Design experience is essential to engineering
education, and provides a powerful motivating context for learning fundamental
physical principles: One cannot design a jet engine, refrigerator, or powerplant
without using a broad range of physical principles. Design environments
that scaffold students, allowing them to focus on fundamentals, could prove
invaluable for instruction in basic science as well as engineering, and
could better motivate interest in science learning. Design experiences
are difficult to provide in typical classroom settings, because many interesting
physical artifacts (such as power plants, jet engines, and refrigerators)
are expensive or dangerous to build and experiment with. Articulate virtual
laboratories will address these problems by enabling students to design,
analyze, and test artifacts in a simulated environment, cheaply and safely.
They will provide coaching for students, in order to help them understand
fundamental principles, to help them practice the skills needed to model,
analyze, and design physical systems, and to provide the kind of supervision
that a good laboratory assistant provides by way of minimizing unenlightening
aspects of student explorations.
Creating articulate virtual laboratories requires synthesizing advances
involving several AI technologies.
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Qualitative physics provides formal representations for the
tacit knowledge of scientists and engineers that connects their professional
knowledge to their experience-based intuitions, enabling software to use
methods and concepts similar to those deemed natural by domain experts.
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Compositional modeling provides representations and reasoning
techniques for computer-assisted modeling (e.g., how to apply professional
knowledge of a domain to modeling real-world situations so that they can
be formally analyzed).
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Truth-maintenance systems provide reasoning services and the
raw material for constructing explanations of the system's results and
reasoning in terms that help students understand the domain of study.
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Symbolic algebra and constraint propagation provide mathematical
solutions.
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Analogical processing techniquesprovide the ability to retrieve
and apply results from libraries of worked out designs and examples to
novel situations, in order to coach students.
We are developing two prototype articulate virtual laboratories, in collaboration
with engineering faculty at Northwestern University and at Oxford University
who are willing to use them with their students. The first concerns thermodynamic
cycles, an idealization used in the conceptual design of power plants,
propulsion systems, refrigeration systems,and heat pumps. To master the
design and analysis of thermodynamic cycles requires a deep understanding
of a substantial body of thermodynamics. The second concerns feedback
controllers. The concepts of feedback and control theory permeate modern
science and engineering. While mathematical analyses are required to design
optimal controllers, we believe that many of the important concepts of
feedback could be grasped by high school students, given appropriate scaffolding.
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