An experimental environment for the production of pedagogical simulations

Abstract

The topic of this paper is the production of pedagogical simulations. Intended authors are trainers or teachers who are not programming specialists.

In the first part, we define the kind of simulations we are interested in, and we describe the controls we want to exercise on the student's behavior.

Next we present a development methodology of pedagogical simulations and a corresponding environment. Developed in collaboration with the Technical Planning Education Center of Hewlett-Packard, the MELISA environment provides workspaces dedicated to the production of each component of the application: Model, Representation, Scenario. Each of these workspaces offers graphical specification tools. These tools automatically generate parts of the final application code. In order to illustrate more precisely the MELISA environment, we give a step by step description of the development of a concrete example.

We also explain how this facilitates in particular a prototyping approach in which the author can build and validate his application in an incremental way.