The design and evolution of TurboTurtle, a collaborative microworld for exploring Newtonian physics

Abstract

TurboTurtle is a dynamic multi-user microworld for the exploration of Newtonian physics. With TurboTurtle, students can alter the attributes of the simulation environment, such as gravity, friction, and presence or absence of walls. Students explore the microworld by manipulating a variety of parameters, and learn concepts by studying the behaviours and interactions that occur.TurboTurtle has evolved into a "group-aware" system where several students, each on their own computer, can simultaneous control the microworld and gesture around the shared display. TurboTurtle's design rationale includes concepts such as equal opportunity controls, simulation timing, concrete versus abstract controls, recoverability, and how strictly views should be shared between students. Teachers can also add structure to the group's activities by setting the simulation environment to an interesting state, which includes a set of problems and questions. Observations of pairs of young children using TurboTurtle highlight extremes in collaboration styles, from conflict to smooth interaction. Finally, the technical work in making TurboTurtle group-aware is slight, primarily because it was built with a groupware toolkit called GroupKit.

Collaborative distributed environments for learning design tasks by means of modelling and simulation

“…In order to propose a classification of CMSL systems in which to frame the environment we have developed, we have studied the following simulation-based learning environments that incorporate collaborative support: ERCIS (Berglund and Eriksson, 1998), SESAM (Software Engineering by Simulation of Animated Models; Schneider and Nakakoji, 1995), SIMPLE (Simulated Processes in a Learning Environment; Plaisant et al, 1999), WebNet (Stahl, 2000), LESP 3 (Learning Environment for Simulation of Particulate models of matter), TurboTurtle (Cockburn and Greenberg, 1998), SIMPLEZ (Llamas et al, 2001) and CROS (Giannetti, 1998). These systems can be studied from two criteria: the type of modelling they allow and the collaboration strategies they incorporate (see Table 1).…”

Leogo: An Equal Opportunity User Interface for Programming

“…We have extensive experience with collaborative software developed in GroupKit [30], including Turbo-Turtle, a collaborative micro-world for exploring Newtonian physics [3]. We do not foresee any major obstacles in making Leogo fully collaboration-aware.…”

Um modelo conceitual para aprendizagem colaborativa baseada na execução de projetos pela Web.

“…Porém, acha-se conveniente, de agora em diante, estabelecer um critério comum para o termo "grupo". Propõe-se assumir a definição de Cole [20] Vários fatores humanos influenciam simultaneamente, e de maneira complexa, no comportamento do grupo, por isso o resultado da interação e do trabalho de seus membros é praticamente impossível de se predizer. Por esta razão, os grupos não podem ser descritos por fórmulas tão simples, como aquelas baseadas na causa e o efeito, senão que se utilizam para isso muitos conceitos em diferentes combinações para compreender melhor o comportamento do grupo [61].…”

“…Aplicação dinâmica e multiusuário para crianças aprenderem a física newtoniana [20]. Cria um ambiente virtual para os membros do grupo aprender pela experiência, manipulando objetos que existem dentro deste ambiente.…”