Usability of Agentsheets for creating Educational Simulation

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Usability of Agentsheets for creating Educational
Simulation

• Ananth Srirangarajan
• Sundeep Gopalaswamy
• Kyuhan Koh
• Jingren Jin
• Computer Science and Software Engineering
• Auburn University

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Computer Assisted Learning

• Ananth Srirangarajan
• Computer Science and Software Engineering
• Auburn University

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What is Computer Assisted Learning?

• Computer-assisted learning (CAL) is an
  approach to teaching and learning in which
  computer technology is used as an aid to the
  presentation, reinforcement and assessment of
  material to be learned, usually including a
  substantial interactive element.

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Traditional Teaching vs. CAL

• The traditional teaching environment is a
  classroom a single teacher giving lectures to a
  group of students who are expected to use their
  notes and textbook to prepare for periodic
  examinations and demonstrate their mastery of the
  subject.
• The use of computers in education shifts the
  focus away from the teacher to the students
  themselves who learn through experimentation on
  the computer with the teacher acting only as a
  guide.

Difference between traditional classroom
learning and Computer Assisted Learning
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Traditional Teaching vs. CAL
Differences between traditional classroom
learning and Computer Assisted Learning
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Advantages of CAL

• It involves any student actively in the learning
  process.
• It allows the learner to proceed at his own pace.
• Reinforcement of learning in such situations is
  immediate and systematized.
• The use of computers in this manner frees faculty
  members or training coordinators to devote more
  time to the personal, human considerations of
  their students.
• CAL is very useful in the realm of remedial
  education.

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Disadvantages of CAL

• The need for teachers and training directors to
  move from accepted methods that work to a new and
  relatively untried method.
• The diversity of computing hardware and CAL
  languages compete with little apparent
  coordination from professionals in the
  educational world.
• The cost of hardware, CAL course materials
  (courseware), and individuals to help implement
  the process.

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Mandatory Features in Educational Games and
Simulations

• Create (or recreate) a phenomena, environment or
  experience.
• Provide an opportunity for understanding.
• Be interactive (i.e. the users inputs must have
  some effect on the course of the simulation).
• Follow consistent models of a theory.
• Be unpredictable in their behavior, either
  because of in-built randomness or due to extreme
  sensitivity to user inputs.

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Agentsheets

• Sundeep Gopalaswamy
• Computer Science and Software Engineering
• Auburn University

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Agentsheets

• Agent-based simulation-authoring tool that allows
  end-users to build interactive simulations and
  publish them as Java applets
• Operations possible in Agentsheets
• displaying images
• computing spreadsheet-like formulas
• reacting to mouse clicks and key strokes
• playing sampled sounds and MIDI instruments
• gathering information from web pages.
• Based on grid structure and so similar to
  spreadsheets

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Agentsheets

• Elements of the grid are called Agents
• Agents consists of
• Sensors(to detect triggers)
• Effectors(to communicate with other agents)
• State(condition)
• Depiction(look)
• Instanceof(link to the class of the agent)
• Each agent is empowered to act for a client. The
  client, in turn, can be another agent or the
  user.

Object Oriented Design
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Working with Agentsheets

• Each window is called Worksheet which is
  divided into grids in which agents are embedded.
• Tools are provided to operate on the agents.

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Working with Agentsheets

• There is a gallery which lists all the agents and
  gives options to create/modify agents and their
  behavior and depictions.

• A depiction editor tool is provided to
  create/modify a depiction. The option to import a
  image is also available.

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Working with Agentsheets

• The behavior of every agent can be defined in
  terms of
• Triggering event
• Condition to satisfy
• Action to be performed in case the condition is
  satisfied
• Thus it is very simple to program

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Working with Agentsheets

• There are many modes of triggers such as mouse
  single/double click, key press, on method call,
  while creating the agent and so on.

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Working with Agentsheets

• There are many conditions to verify such as
  finding which agents are in the neighborhood,
  local value being set, frequency of occurrence
  and so on.
• Each of them are categorized for ease of use.

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Working with Agentsheets

• There are many actions that can be performed such
  as changing ones own depictions, broadcasting
  messages to neighborhood, changing worksheets and
  so on.
• This is also categorized for ease of use.

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Psychological Approach

• Kyuhan Koh
• Computer Science and Software Engineering
• Auburn University

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Education psychology

• Recombination Technique
• Teaching bolo, vaca, mala, and pato, Learning
  boca and mapa.
• bo from bolo and ca from vaca.
• bo ca boca

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• Exclusion and stimulus equivalence
• when we teach students some vocabulary, we can
  get good results by showing the students a
  picture of each object, and asking them to name
  it and then writing the corresponding word
• Show pictures and sound the relationship between
  carnivore and herbivore and display text
  explanation

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Model Design

• Show relationship with pictures
• Display relationship with text
• Tell relationship with sound

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Model Design (1)
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Model Design (2-1)
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Model Design (2-2)
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Model Design (2-3)
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Results, suggestions and conclusion

• Jingren Jin
• Computer Science and Software Engineering
• Auburn University

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Result
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Result contd
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Result contd
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Result contd
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Result contd
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Suggestions

• While in "Run" state all the tools should be
  disabled.
• The size of agent should be flexible.
• Text on agent should be supported.

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Conclusion

• Experiment data
• Programmer's aspecteasyeffective
• Educational aspectimage sound text

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